Measure Five Times - Cut Once.
The meaning of the word “decide” comes from the Latin word, decidere, which is a combination of two words:
de = ‘off’
caedere = ‘cut’
The carpenter’s wisdom: ‘Measure twice, cut once’ applies.
The Five Steps to a Good Decision allow us to measure the width, depth, and length of our decision five times before we decide, and cut off other futures.
The Good Decision Making Workshop Elevator Pitch ( 1st Floor)
Ever made a choice you regretted?
The Good Decision-Making Workshop equips you with tools to enhance clarity, reduce regrets, learn from error, and continuously improve.
Begin your mastery of the art of choosing wisely by choosing a workshop.
A decision you won’t regret.
The Good Decision Making Workshop (35th Floor) Elevator Pitch.
All Leadership and Management boil down to good decision making.
A good decision is one that advances us towards where we want to be.
Therefore - we need to be clear about where we want to be.
‘We’ as a person and ‘we’ as an organisation.
A person joins an organisation because there is a mutual need to be somewhere - the organisation is going somewhere (selling widgets) that will help me to get to where I want to be (paying the mortgage) - and vice versa.
The Good Decision Making Workshop begins with participants privately identifying where they personally want to be, before they collaboratively identify where the organisation wants to be.
Thus after the first half an hour - each person should all be very clear that I choose to be in the organisation to take it - and therefore me - to where we want to be. If not … then … why am I working here?
- ‘The first job of a Leader is to define reality..'
Good decision making is a deliberate process of inquiry that advances us towards where we want to be.
Therefore - we need to have a Deliberate Process of Inquiry.
You can make up your own - or…here’s one I prepared earlier - my Five Steps to a Good Decision.
Whatever process we choose - we have consistency so we can measure our progress, show others our navigating, and make corrections as we go along - including potentially course-correcting as we re-define where we want to be.
As long as you follow the process, you can never be wrong - and I would argue, you can never make a ‘bad’ decision - because every decision should tell you more about where you are in relation to where you want to be - personally and organisationally. ‘Mistakes’ serve continuous improvement. Our Five Steps are the ‘black box’ we can open up and check the data to see exactly where we went ‘wrong’.
If you make a good decision (i.e. apply a deliberate process of inquiry that’s advancing you…) and you turn around and at least one person is following - you’re a Leader. OR If you’re a Leader, you should have a deliberate process of inquiry that makes visible your decision making for others to follow.
Simple!
Good Decision Making is the framework for:
conflict avoidance
conflict resolution
complaints management
management
leadership
Life!
A million military, aviation analogies will help explain these concepts.
In the Ideal Organisation, these concepts would be cascaded from the top, down. That’s what I did at Curtin University (where every Faculty approached me and asked to have me deliver the workshops - they were never mandatory).
The top-down training gives every person at every level comfort that my boss is on the same page, and their boss is on the same page, and that if I follow her deliberate process of inquiry towards our mutually understood purpose - she will support me regardless of the outcome.
So ideally the workshop is presented to:
Executives.
Senior Leaders.
Middle Leaders.
Teams.
or…
Run a pilot workshop and decide what parts of your decision making hierarchy would benefit most.
The boss of Curtin Business School described the workshop as ‘the best PD’ he’d ever done.
Minimum time is three hours - though I have a version that needs a five day residential on Hayman Island... ;)
For your consideration.
The Lonely Boss.
There’s another reason why being a boss is so hard and lonely.
As a worker there is no shortage of feedback - at the very least your boss is formally telling you how you’re going once a year.
As a boss - nothing.
Or at least nothing beyond sycophancy and the tedious shaking hands and kissing babies performances.
The best the boss gets is an underperforming worker. They’re left to mind-reading and minefield navigation to work out whether it’s them or us.
Assuming the boss is the kind that considers it’s even possible it may be ‘them’.
In the Loop.
All prime ministers have to make hard calls, as so many decisions are contentious, even within parties, and have to be resolved by someone taking a side. The challenge is to ensure that people feel sufficiently “in the loop” to accept the decisions that go against them.
- Former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott
Step 5 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision is: Give a Hearing.
We invite anyone who may be adversely affected by our decision to contribute to it.
Concerned or anxious this may open a can of worms?
Return to Step 1 and start again.
Good Craft Values.
At a minimum, the decision-making process must maintain its integrity.
A decision-making process with integrity—one that involves proper consultation with the right people and a careful opinion with good craft values—will inform how the decision is looked at later, even if the substance of the decision turns out not to have been, from the perspective of hindsight, the right one.
Ultimately, how the [professional] reached the decision will be scrutinized. If he or she reached the decision in a proper way, that will affect how critics view the merits.
- Professor Jack Goldsmith
Craft values.
An internal standard of good practice - excellence or virtues - in a profession.
What is your profession’s ‘craft values’?
What is your job’s ‘craft values’?
Are you a lawyer with a ‘pro-management advice is good advice’ craft value?
Are you a Human Resources practitioner with a ‘Gotcha!’ craft value attitude to employee misconduct?
Are you a boss with a ‘what’s the use of power if you can’t abuse it?’ craft value?
If you conduct decision making processes with integrity, it’s difficult to maintain an authentic craft value that bends the advice or decision towards any of the above. I
Your craft value is the product of good decision making processes.
Give Them A King.
So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”
But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him … ‘Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord.
The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
- The Book of Samuel.
Find a government and a boss to fight all our battles.
Relieve us from the anxiety that comes with freedom.
Dress One Trouser Leg at a Time.
“The empire created the emperors."
- Dame Mary Beard
Whenever a scandal or crisis involves an organisation, the top boss is trotted out to address the media or otherwise signal accountability and appease the mob.
If the CEO, or board chair, or minister is silent, the petulant media demands to know why. The longer the silence continues, the louder the calls for ‘accountability’ grow. It becomes almost personal. Like a scorned lover stalking their ex - ‘the public’ - aka the media demand ‘answers’ - aka - advertising dollars. The story moves to page one.
Eventually somebody utters ‘cover up’ and we’re off.
Who really thinks the minister, board chair, or chief executive knows the reason why something went wrong, let alone can fix it? Why a tired and overworked minimum wage earner overlooked a checklist item or a long-neglected piece of kit finally failed?
Like children, we need to believe in the Old Man with the Long White Beard.
We cling to the Great (Wo)Man Theory of organisations.
We endow the CEO with super powers. Same with our boss, as if they don’t put their trousers on one leg at a time. Be respectful, but never subservient.
Because, like the Emperors, with rare exceptions it’s not the boss who made our workplace or organisation great. It’s you, and the person before you. (And if your workplace is not so great … then …?)
The boss should remember that, and act with due humility.
Watch This.
“An Intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself"
- Albert Camus
When we Step Back - we take a seat in the stands and watch ourselves react.
With each of the remaining Five Steps to a Good Decision, we coach our thoughts at play on the field of deliberation.
We watch our mind at work.
We are intellectuals.
We Pack Our Children's Parachutes.
Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.
- Benny Hill
Complainants do us a favour. They are the spokespeople for those who either vote with their feet, suffer in silence, or would eventually be disappointed but for the remedy that follows a complaint.
Parents pack our children’s parachutes and send them off to compulsory school.
We should be grateful to any parent who complains.
I Can Do That.
'“Communication is what our lives are about. We must try. To be better or not doesn’t matter. Measurement is out of our reach. One only tries to send a message, a note, however inadequate from one aloneness to another.”
Will I always make a good decision if I follow the Five Steps? Of course not.
Will I always gain clarity by stepping back? It’s naive to believe so.
Will my good decision making process be recognised and rewarded? Doubtful.
Will anyone follow the path I lay for them? No guarantees.
Why bother?
When we pay attention, even to our own thinking and hesitant steps to a process, we signal ‘This is important.’ One person - perhaps more - may look up from their fear and possibly think ‘I can do that …’.
Walking is falling from one foot to another.
Creator or Slave.
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
You don’t have to adopt the Five Steps to a Good Decision. Create your own system.
In the meantime, I hope those chains don’t chafe.
Mind the Gap.
A complaint reveals either:
A gap in your information leading to a decision or absence of decision, or
A gap in the complainant’s information or expectation.
You review the complaint and either change or affirm your decision with the information or after asking the complainant for more details, or
You fill the complainant’s information or expectation gap.
If the complainant challenges your response, you check whether their challenge reveals information gaps with them or you. If so, you address it as above.
If not, you respond that you’ve considered their response, and affirm your decision.
If the complainant challenges your response, you politely direct them either to your superior, or to your complaints process.
If you continue to engage with a complainant offering you no new information, you are training them that the price of getting what they want from you is one, two, three, fifteen, twenty emails, phone calls, or visits to reception.
The Shadow of Your Ego.
In the services the major proponents of tank development included, ironically, a small group of naval officers. The fact that the Admiralty felt less ‘threatened’ by tanks than did the War Office was strikingly illustrated at one of those demonstrations wherein proponents of a new idea strive to convert sceptics by confrontation with the evidence of their senses.After an impeccable display, in which prototype tanks cutthrough barbed wire, crossed trenches, slithered through mud and clawed their way out of craters, a naval officer was heard to remark: ‘We ought to order three thousand now!’ But the War Office contingent remained cool, one senior general retorting: ‘Who is this damned naval man saying we will want three thousand tanks? He talks like Napoleon.’
Norman F Dixon, ‘On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence’
Step 1 of the Five Steps to a Good Decision is Step Back.
Get perspective.
Stop blocking the light of alternative choices with the shadow cast by your ego.
Psychologically Hardy.
People who are psychologically hardy, it turns out, believe very prevalently some things about the world. So, if you believe that the world is a meaningful place, if you see yourself as having agency within that world, and if you see successes and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things…then you are more likely to be psychologically hardy, and therefore more resilient in the face of trauma.
- Andrew Zolli
If you believe that the world is a meaningful place [Personal Widget].
If you see yourself as having agency within that world [Decision Making].
And if you see success and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things [Decisions Measured Against Widget].
You are more likely to be psychologically hardy and therefore more resilient in the face of trauma [Life].
Think About Me to Think About You.
Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness — the feeling that someone is trying to think about us — something we want more than praise?
Prof Stephen Grosz
When we Step Back - we are present to ourselves. To our emotions. To our sullen, selfish, child self. We stare our imperfection and unworthiness in the face. We think about the Us that we truly are: confused, disoriented, alone. It’s hard work.
We want to change. To look outward. We’re ready.
Only then can we be present to the Others in our decision.
We try to think about Them.
Harder to Lie.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov
The Five Steps to a good decision show our working out.
By showing our working out - even to ourselves - we make it harder to lie to ourselves. Not impossible - but harder.
Let the Unwatched Pot Boil.
These stories suggest that an initial period of concentration—conscious, directed attention—needs to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing. Mathematicians will often speak of the first phase of this process as “worrying” about a problem or idea. It’s a good word, because it evokes anxiety and upset while also conjuring an image of productivity: a dog worrying a bone, chewing at it to get to the marrow—the rich, meaty part of the problem that will lead to its solution. In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil.
- Dan Rockmore, Professor of Mathematics
Miserable.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
~ William James
Which comes first:
80% of workers are disengaged from their jobs so don’t make decisions?
Or that 80% of workers don’t make decisions so disengage?
Either way, they’re miserable.