Four Benefits.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I make decisions all day. That’s all I do. Decision making is so routine that I don’t even think about it. And I certainly don’t need to be ‘taught’ how to make decisions by you, or anyone else. That would be embarrassing, quite frankly.’
I hear you…
… and see what you did there?
You showed your working out.
You made your work visible.
You could have just felt patronised by the idea you need to learn how to make a good decision - and moved on. I would never be the wiser as to why.
Instead - you gave me a ‘because’ - which has four benefits:
First, adding a ‘because’ significantly increases my compliance.
Second, it forces you to reflect on your decision, because you have to make it conscious, even if you just think about it and don’t tell me.
Third, it gives me the opportunity to modify my thinking, based on the reasoning you’ve given OR for me to modify your thinking.
Finally, if I work for you or with you, making your work visible helps me to learn from and therefore use, or predict your decisions - which makes less decisions for you to make.
Having a decision making process makes us better decision makers. Making that process visible, or at least becoming aware of our process (assuming we even have one) improves not just our process, but the behaviours of those around us.
In a word: Leading.
Don't Fall For It.
In the movie John Wick 4, Mr Wick is fighting his way up the 222 steps to Sacré Cœur Basilica in Paris, struggling to meet a dawn deadline.
Assailants come at him from all directions, and at one point he tumbles back down several flights to the bottom. He gets to his feet and resumes his journey, dodging a hail of bullets, swords, and lethal projectiles directed at him by dozens of assassins, in a ten minute suspension of disbelief fight scene as only Hollywood can get away with.
The army of shooters sent to impede Mr Wick from reaching his destination has been sent by the person who summoned him to the dawn meeting.
Just your average workplace.
Organisations and your bosses have a number of ways of treating you as if you are a five year old. That inhibits you. It triggers dormant five year old responses.
If you don’t believe me, think of how you unconsciously behave in your workplace. At meetings or presentations in particular. Passive. Submissive. Obedient. Often secretly defiant. Day-dreaming. Texting. Emailing. Switching off. Disengaged.
Don’t fall for it.
Don’t allow the boss or HR or whoever it is that assumes they dominate you to get the jump on you in the arm wrestle. Don’t let them get the upper hand.
Exude confidence. Courteous, respectful, civil, Confidence.
Expect a counter-attack as the superior attempts to assert their positional power.
How do you respond to stay on top?
Make decisions.
Make as many decisions as you can that can then be executed either by you or those who you work with, independently of the superior.
The more decisions you make, the more feedback you gain, the more you learn. The more connections and relationships you form. The more you gain control over your circumstances independently of the power figure.
Sure, the power figure will seek opportunities to put you in your place. Respond respectfully. Nibble on some humble pie from time to time. Give them small wins.
Then get back to making decisions. Small decisions. Big decisions. Make lots.
And remember this:
The person with positional power ALWAYS wins. They will ALWAYS pin you in the arm wrestle.
‘What?!!’ I hear you say. ‘Then - what’s the point? Why bother with all that decision making stuff?’
Because with every decision you make, you learn, grow, build your Widget, build another Widget. Learn about yourself. Your capacity. Other people. Life.
You may choose to leave that boss or organisation.
There will always be another boss or power figure wanting to arm wrestle you.
Your wrestle may (almost inevitably) end up being with fate, or tragedy, or illness or heartache or loss or death.
What your bad bosses and organisations teach you - more than the good ones - is how to wrestle with Life. And that Life is bigger than the boss. And Life goes on.
Bad bosses are exceptionally good teachers of Life.
The submissive five year old never has the thrill and benefit of those lessons.
That’s why they’re stuck as a submissive five year old.
Ideas.
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.
- Carl Jung
Someone has an opinion.
Are they higher or lower than you on the HR wire diagram?
Token conversation.
End of meeting.
Someone has an opinion.
Someone else casually holds it up to the light, turns it, squints and pokes, sniffs, and asks questions. Hands it to another person. ‘Does it come in other colours?’ Another reaches over. ‘Why are you using a screw cap and not a cork?’ Another leans in, inspects the idea, and asks ‘Could you use glass instead of plastic?’
The opinion holder confidently answers and explains. Everyone nods, and takes the opinion away with them.
End of meeting.
Next meeting.
‘We took your opinion, added mag wheels, window tinting, and a spoiler.’
You’re the people I want to hang out with.
You’re the people who make meetings a joy.
Thank you.
Not Broken.
Organisations, bosses, and consultants routinely talk up their people, teams, and clients. Paper over the cracks. Glass half full. Motivate the troops. Be positive.
Because that’s what we do.
Nothing is broken.
The problem with telling the world that nothing is broken - is that it’s a lie. Something is always broken. Something can always be improved.
That’s okay, because we all know how to play the game. We’ve been learning since we were children. The boss knows that - so treats us like children.
We’re not broken.
We wouldn’t know what to do anyway if the boss or the President or Prime Minister said ‘We’re broken. I need your help to fix us.’
We wouldn’t know what to do because -
We’re broken.
Hidden Planets.
Astronomers calculated there must be another planet beyond the limit of their instruments. Their theory was based on the observed irregularities in the behaviour of other objects.
Something else was out there - influencing behaviour.
Observe the behaviour of people in your organisation with the naked eye.
Notice how what they do, differs from what they say, and what they expect of you. See how their walk deviates from their talk.
Another large object, invisible to the eye, is exercising its forces on that person.
A mortgage.
Ambition.
Approval.
Incompetence.
Imposter Syndrome.
These people rely on the veil of hierarchy, civility, and at least one boss who enables their behaviour through wilful blindness or incompetence.
Or because the boss’s judgement and integrity are warped by their own hidden force acting on them.
Omniscience.
The wise person considers a decision with the sober acceptance they may be wrong.
This possibility focusses their mind, motivates them to consult widely and weigh up all the evidence. Even to rehearse the eulogy for their failed endeavour in their head.
The person exercising positional power has no need for that nonsense.
Consulting others is a waste of the authority given to them that commissions them to be decisive. It also undermines the reverence others have for their omniscience.
Besides, if anyone else could do a better job, they’d have the job.
All the positional power person rehearses is pointing the finger of blame.
The Cosmic Widget.
There is your Weekday Widget: The thing you're paid to do or make.
Your Boss’s Widget: The thing your boss is paid to do or make that your Widget plugs into.
Your Employer’s Widget: the thing your employer does or makes that your boss’s Widget plugs into. And so on up the hierarchy.
Your Weekend Widget: the thing you can do with the money you get paid for making your Weekday Widget
There is another Widget that, if defined, may bring clarity to the other Widgets, and thus your decision making:
Your Cosmic Widget.
If you are a person of faith, identifying your Cosmic Widget is easy. It’s the Higher Power you believe you are on earth to serve.
If you’re not, then your Cosmic Widget might be something like ‘To Leave the World a Better Place’, or ‘To Do Unto Others’, or 'To Be Useful’.
Having a Cosmic Widget that lies beyond the immediate needs and gratifications of today, or even a lifetime, can be a profound anchor and guide to reviewing and recalibrating or even entirely replacing your other Widgets. It can also help resolve Widget Conflict: What to do when two or more of your Widgets are not serving each other. Like navigators of old, you can take out your metaphorical sextant and measure your path from here, to the middle distance Widget, to the visible horizon Widget, to a far off Widget such as Eternal Life.
It may even work in reverse. You may find that your Weekday Widget ends up redefining your Cosmic Widget.
Pedal to the Metal.
The young basketball coach delivered a post-game speech to her team of 10 year olds.
‘Next week, we’ve got to put the pedal to the metal!’
‘What does that mean?’ one player asked - as only ten year olds who don’t drive cars and therefore don’t understand the workings of an accelerator pedal, could.
The coach paused, then said, ‘You know… like … when you’re … riding your bike. Pedalling along. It means … go …faster….’ The coach didn’t know the literal meaning either. She just knew - correctly - it meant play hard and don’t slack off. Probably from the context she had heard it used by other coaches.
At first I thought this was a lesson in the importance of our audience knowing our metaphor. You have to have driven a car to apply the metaphor to your context.
Then I realised it represented a more common behaviour of deeper significance.
‘Excellence.’ ‘Committed To.’ ‘Totally Committed To.’ ‘Paramount Importance.’ ‘Team.’ ‘Service.’ ‘Continuous Improvement.’ ‘Agile.’ ‘Community.’ ‘Learning Organisation.’ ‘Customer Focussed.’‘Partnership.’ ‘Leadership.’
Everybody has read, heard or used these words and slogans like them. There’s an assumption that the audience knows what each word literally means.
That’s a patently dumb assumption.
What is ‘Excellence’? ‘Team’? ‘Leadership’? My ‘Agile’ might be your ‘Meh’.
But unlike the ten year old basketballer, few in your audience will ask ‘What does ‘Excellence’ mean?’ - even if we’ve never seen Excellence in the wild in our organisation. No. We’ll nod, reach for a mint, and check our phones beneath the table. Even if we do tempt fate to ask, like the young coach, the speaker or author may well pause, and fumble some unsatisfactory explanation and move on.
Why? Because like the coach, we don’t know what these words literally mean.
And we know that doesn’t matter.
Nobody expects us to. We know they’re not used literally.
We’re only expected to hear the music, not read the lyrics.
We’re only expected to know what using those catch cries signals. We know, like the music score of a movie designed to heighten arousal, these lofty words are a performance.
Most of the time what they signal is that the speaker is exhorting us to do something better or differently. The speaker is almost always a person in positional power, someone engaged by the person in positional power over us to ‘train’ us, or someone trying to sell us something. Like a bugler awakening sleeping troops.
In other words, like the ten year olds who’ve never pressed on an accelerator but knew from the context, that their coach is urging them on, nobody stops to think ‘Hang on - do these people know what ‘Excellence’ looks like? How can they expect ‘Excellence’ from us when we’re so poorly led?’ Instead, we’ve learned from the organisational context that this word coleslaw is just another power flex performance from the boss or someone selling us something. Words don’t matter.
I wonder what would happen if next time you’re being clichéd by catch cries from a motivational speaker, consultant, or boss, you dare to ask ‘When you say ‘Agile’, what does that look like in my context, motivational speaker? What is an example of ‘Agile’, consultant? What do you want me to do, boss?
Or otherwise, just reach for another mint and check your socials.
Bushfire.
Crisis is a distinctive and necessary element of the bureaucratic system. It provides the only means of making the necessary adjustments, and it therefore plays a role in enabling the organisation to develop and, indirectly, for centralisation and impersonality to grow.
- Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
Either schedule regular, controlled burns.
Or wait years for the inevitable uncontrolled bushfire.
Healthy.
"Disempowerment is at the heart of poor health – physical, mental and emotional."
Johan Hari, ‘Lost Connections.’
Good decision making gives you agency over the process that leads to an outcome that leads to information that leads to learning that leads to understanding that leads to decision making that leads to good health.
Looks Like.
The liar relies on their lie looking like the truth.
The boss relies on their bossing looking like leadership.
The lucky man relies on their luck looking like hard work.
The incompetent relies on their chaos looking like transformation.
The pie-warmer relies on their inertia looking like wisdom.
The challenge for the honest, hard working, transformative, competent, wise leader:
Your work looks like failure.
Especially to the lucky, liars, bosses, incompetent, pie warmers.
Busy.
You start your new job.
Not much work. Nobody knows you or your skills.
You’re almost bored.
You complete some tasks and if you do them well … more work comes in.
(If you don’t do them well, work fizzles because you add no value to others’ work.)
More good work begets more work. Until you’re doing so much work that you earn that badge of honour that, when people ask ‘How’s work?’ You qualify to answer:
‘Busy.’
You’ve made it.
And that’s where most of us stay.
Busy. So busy. Can’t-wait-for-the-weekend busy.
You’ve learned that Busy is the natural state of a good worker.
Ask around.
Everyone is busy.
Busy = success = good person = alibi for missing a child’s assembly. Busy.
Busy. Always busy.
You don’t want not to be busy - because, as explained above, it’s a sign of incompetence.
You’re wrong.
Not being busy is evidence of being outstanding at your job. You stand out. Exceptional. You are the exception. In the 1% of 1% of those who do your job.
Going from being flat out busy to not being busy - means you’ve given those who rely on you the greatest gift a person can give another in a workplace:
The confidence to do business.
You’ve exerted the extra time, intelligence, energy, creativity, and risk - to go upstream and work out why the bodies are falling in - while still hauling bodies out. Because you’re doing two things: hauling and going upstream - you’re super-busy for a time. You’re going beyond what you’re paid or acknowledged for. There’s a hump.
Whether it’s through mentoring, training, harnessing technology or removing gatekeepers and unnecessary bureaucracy - you have succeeded in transferring enough of your knowledge to others that they rarely need you to do their jobs.
Explaining why nobody sets out to reach this level of not busy in their work.
Not only is it hard and takes creativity and a period of super-busy. But because not being busy looks exactly the same as someone who’s incompetent or lazy.
It puts your job in jeopardy when the boss or HR come looking to cost cut.
It makes it hard to justify why you can’t help out at your child’s school.
Removing friction from the trajectory of another’s decision making should be the objective of every worker. It’s a remarkable act of selfless service.
Especially when that friction is you.
The New Boss.
Yeah
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss.- Pete Townshend
The new boss begins.
Spends 90 days listening, observing, learning.
Tick.
She meets with you, and while you’re wary about disclosing too much about your frustrations with the incompetence and dysfunction, her discerning questions reveal she gets it.
Tick.
A friend from the new boss’s old organisation confides in you that the new boss gets your workplace, but can’t make any changes yet.
Tick.
Four months in and the new boss asks your advice and you’re reassured that she gets it, and values your opinion on how to make changes.
Six months in and you’re in a meeting where the new boss asks some good questions and you see the other bosses subtly shut the new boss down. You sense this is not the first time the old bosses have put the new boss in her new boss place.
Nine months in and the new boss has a new car.
Twelve months in and the new boss is leading some projects with the old bosses and making decisions needing old boss approval and cooperation - and her ‘teamwork’ is publicly acknowledged by the old bosses.
Eighteen months in and the new boss is identified with many decisions made with the old bosses and your friend says he doesn’t speak much with the new boss and therefore can’t offer any insight into the new boss’s thinking these days.
Two years in and the new boss is an old boss and has ‘Chief’ added to her title.
The Five Steps.
Step 1: Step Back
[In our head]: What did I do to deserve this? Why are people so stupid? Why am I working here? Why aren't I paid more? Why aren't I lying on a beach somewhere? Why don't I quit and write a novel? Why don't people listen? Why do I keep getting let down? Why didn't I make myself clear? What did I do wrong? Who can I blame? What If I'm to blame? Am I any good? Do people take me seriously? Can I put up with this any more? Why didn't I get enough hugs as a child?
Step 2: Define the Issue
What’s my Widget? What’s my boss’s Widget? What does my boss want me to do? Do I have the power to make that decision? If not - who does?
Step 3: Assess the Information
What policies do we have relating to the information that I have? Do I need to get more information? Who might have that information?
Step 4: Check for Bias.
How am I feeling about this information? Am I able to make a decision that serves my Widget? Is there something that's distracting me from that outcome? Do I have a personal interest in the outcome that may be at odds with my Widget?
Am I open to persuasion? Do I have a prejudgement that the evidence can change? Is there any lingering remnant of personal angst I didn’t shed in Step 1 that means I need to step back again or pass the decision onto someone else? Am I open to the better argument?
Step 5: Give a Hearing
Who might be adversely affected by my decision? Who has a stake in it professionally such that their perspective may help me?
Epaulettes.
We defer to a stranger with a set of epaulettes.
Badges, baton or thing to point with are optional.
See him on the streets re-directing vehicle and foot traffic, in building foyers controlling visitors, on the edge of merry-go-rounds scolding small children.
People and organisations pin epaulettes on sentences as power symbols.
Vigorously defend.
Zero Tolerance.
Committed to.
Totally committed to.
Dry clean only.
Do not wash or tumble dry with the Truth.
Untruth.
“Even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd ... untruth would at once be let in. The crowd is untruth.”
The organisation continues to act consistently with its fictional story of what it is, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
If the reality organisation and fictional organisation passed in the street they would not recognise each other.
If the organisation was a person, it would be diagnosed with a mental disorder.
Supreme Court Gardens 1989.
““Learning is finding out what you already know.
Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
You are all learners, doers, teachers.”
― Richard Bach”
It was 1989.
Shaun and I were chatting on a bench in the Supreme Court Gardens.
Sometime during our conversation, we co-created the idea of designing and delivering training that would give a student the knowledge and skills to do something.
That ‘something’ was whatever it was that the student had to do as a result of the training.
By working backwards, a trainer should go to the workplace, observe what workers do - or more correctly produce or perform - and teach students how to do those things.
In 1989, Shaun and I Discovered Objectives.
Later, we also discovered that Peter Drucker wrote about Objectives in 1954.
Maybe he thought it up sitting on a park bench.
For Shaun and me, it didn’t matter. Indeed, knowing that a world-renowned management guru (and no doubt many lesser-known experts) had already written about ‘our’ idea, only strengthened our sense of competence and creativity.
Leaving us to remind our students that they know as much as we did.