The power of decisions

We make 20,000-35,000 decisions a day, many of them without much cognitive effort or attention, and all of them influencing whether we succeed or fail, become happy or sad, lonely or loved. This blog aims to provide you with some of the latest and best ideas, concepts and practices used by elite sport, special forces, magicians and businesses to help nudge those decisions in the right direction.
Note: it turns out magicians are brilliant at deceiving your decision-making processes and consequently a fantastic source of information for working at how the brain works.

The key principles for all these processes revolve around:

• Avoiding assumptions
• Recognising when to use logic vs instinct
• Becoming skillful at logical and instinctive decision making by reviewing past decisions

The practice

6 Ways to make better decisions

1. Culture: Empowering your teams to make their own decisions, and avoiding blame
2. Planning: Testing your assumptions
3. Training: Practice with realism
4. Communication: Briefing and brief backs
5. Feedback: Optimising learning through colleagues and clients
6. Awareness: Understanding your and your team’s decision-making preferences, biases, blindspots and strengths

These tools may seem simple but in reality, very few organisations do these basic procedures well if at all, while the introduction of them is at the heart of reaching high performance.

1. Culture

Empower and support your teams to make decisions

So many bosses see leadership as a process of directing their teams. All decisions have to go through them, often because mistakes are seen as having a major impact on the bottom line or because they don’t really trust their teams to make decisions. The reality is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and teams with this leadership will always rely on the leader, the leaders become pressurised because they have to answer emails all of the time, can’t rely on their team and become stressed and either leave or get worse at their decision-making. Coincidently their teams get very skilful at bailing them out. In fact, one organisation continually (and regularly) gave big financial rewards, awards and even a dinner in their honour for the people that pulled them out of difficult situations. However, they never recognised or rewarded projects that ran smoothly. What behaviours was this approach reinforcing?

Skills and decisions need to be practiced, they need to have feedback and be reviewed not just by the outcome (did we get the contract) but also by the process too.

All the evidence over years of successful organisations across all business recognise this as an important factor and yet as individuals we struggle to let go of this deeply held belief of control and the need to tell others what to do.

A great leader coaches those around them to make great decisions, and provides them with opportunities, support, feedback and challenge.

Some ideas about how to change that:

• Designate jobs/tasks by the outcomes you need them to achieve, not how to do it.
• Get skilled in asking great questions that shape good decisions
• Generate objective feedback for the team in the review process
• Feedback needs to explore the process and not just the outcomes
• Mistakes are the lessons for developing decision-making. No one likes making them but don’t let them terrify your team. Fear kills effective decision-making.
• Introduce briefs and brief backs (see Topic 4)

2. Planning

Testing your assumptions (Pre-Mortem)

We know from the research that we tend to go for the first option we generate and then stack the evidence to support that decision when we plan. The pre-mortem process was designed by Gary Klein to allow teams to explore their plans from a different perspective,  exposing the assumptions and possible pitfalls of a plan, allowing us to side step away from biases and assumptions that we all unconsciously cling to when we plan. 

Pre-Mortem Instructions:

• The whole project team needs to be involved.
• In the first hour create an exhaustive list of what could go wrong with the project, including the crazy ones. Don’t try and short cut this section. No discussion of solutions or ridiculing ideas.
• Pick the top 10 and divide them into: 
  • Show stoppers – critical to the success of the project
  • High chance of happening
  • Outside of your control.
• Create solutions for each issue and individual’s roles and responsiblities (record these).
• DO YOU STILL WANT TO CARRY ON WITH THE PROJECT? This is the chance to reflect on the viability of the project actually working.

3. Training

Practice with realism

If you really want learning, skills and decisions to be embedded in your working practices you need to train them with realism. As our brains link learning to location, that means not creating training events in posh hotels or conference centres but in environments, rooms and buildings where you normally work. Just like a professional tennis player who trains at Wimbledon, using crowd noises to get used the pressure they know they will experience in a tournament, organisations need to do the same, using standard meeting rooms to practise leadership skills, difficult conversations, giving feedback, asking great questions, and so on. Some of the training we create now goes one step further and, like the tennis player playing against a top player, uses actors to replicate specific scenarios, generating that emotional response (delegates have really felt they were talking to that annoying colleague or difficult boss). This is where we truly get the chance to coach the real skill of that person and the impact has so much more effect than a gentle role play in a nice hotel.

4. Communication

Understanding and being understood

One of the key tools to help a leader trust their colleagues or team is to ensure that any task they give is fully understood. Part of this relies on the quality of the brief by the leader, trying to clarify what is needed and expected while eliminating any assumptions or ambiguities that the leader might have made. The aim is to create clarity and understanding of what the task is and any expectations that shape the quality of the task. Try to eliminate the desire to tell the person how to do.

The second part of this trust process is then focused on allowing the colleague to ‘Brief Back’ their plan to explain their interpretation of the task and how they are going to solve. The aim of the ‘Brief Back’ is to generate confidence that the tasks is fully understood, the awareness of issues, threats, and to share their approach about how they will complete the task.

5. Feedback

The language of learning

Feedback is essential to generating learning, whether that be internal (thoughts and feelings) or external (other people or measures such as time, speed, etc.) 

This is why we create a process that allows any person or team to effectively review any activity and create the change to improve. Egos and blame cultures are the death knell for this process because they are not objective. Objectivity, self-reflection, and the ability to see your skills and actions from another perspective is vital for developing expertise, something most people try to avoid mainly because no-one likes to be told they didn’t get it right. But real skill development must ignore what our brain wants and deal with what our brain needs to improve.

The easiest review process to instigate is:

• What did we do well?
• What could we do better?

The reason for its effectiveness is that it looks for solutions and lessons, not blame. It requires courage and practice to deliver because we generally don’t like to point out when people have made mistakes.

True feedback is neither positive or negative, it merely gives us information on how we have performed.

6. Awareness

Knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses

Everyone is unique, not only in how they perceive issues, but in their skills, strengths, preferences and biases. One of the best tools to help teams understand how these factors affect their dynamics is the Insights Discovery model. It helps to remove the assumptions we make about others and allows teams to share how, as individuals, they look at the world. In addition, it does this from a position of respect, seeking to understand and be understood.

The profile has a multitude of layers that help teams both to understand their personal preferences, and to recognise where their decision making might have some blind spots. For example, a team like this one with a lot of green energy will carefully consider the human impact of any decision, but might be prone to delay in order to avoid offending others or creating conflict. This is likely to cause frustration for those with more red energy who could find their decision-making laboured or lacking crucial challenge. Likewise, a team that has plentiful red energy is likely to move quickly to achieve business objectives, but may overlook the human impact. This could make those with more earth green energy uncomfortable as they feel that decisions are being made too hastily without consideration of people’s needs. 

The Insights Discovery team wheel can offer a real insight into team decision-making, helping that team become more skilful in giving and receiving feedback, and more confident in their instinctive decisions.

References:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters

Seeing What Others Don’t by Gary Klein

Guest writer: Alan Olive

Alan is one of the leading practitioners and consultants to Olympic sports, designing and delivering world leading development programmes and systems for elite coaches. He has supported, trained and worked with over 500 high performance coaches, achieving over 19 Gold medals (30 in total) across 5 Olympic Games.