Decisions Before the Decision

Gaining Confidence and Clarity in Your Decision-Making Process

Imagine how much better things would be if we all made the best decisions in life, love, and leadership?

We all are going to make a bad decision from time to time. In some roles, you might be asked to make numerous significant decisions a week, after all. Just making 4 out of 5 of those decisions right might be a pretty good "batting average." However, those bad decisions bother us, and we'd all like to improve our decision-making. With this article I hope to help you gain more confidence and clarity in the process you use to decide things.

Here's my decision-making process, which I've used for some time and shared with those who asked about it privately. It just involves asking five questions and making smaller, more manageable decisions first before making the final decision. These five decisions before the decision are about the right time, people, options, results, and response. They each include a core question for clarification:

The right time: WHEN do we need to decide?

The right people: WHO do we need to include in the decision?

The right options: WHAT choices are before us and what information influences the decision?

The right results: WHERE do the options lead, including unintended consequences?

The right response: HOW will we react to events with pre-planned contingencies?

These are the best questions to ask before almost any big decision you have to make, personally or professionally. Here's how I think of each and work through them either on my own (making a decision that is mine to make, or with only with my wife), or with a specific leadership team, or even a broad group of stakeholders:

The right TIME means asking "When do we need to decide?"

In emergencies you have to move on your instinctual gut reaction. If something is on fire (literally), reacting at the moment to do something is more important than doing nothing. That is not true in most decisions, however. On the one side, it is important to not be paralyzed by a decision.

As Harvey Cox said, “Not to decide is to decide.”

However, the opposite is likewise a danger, and to decide too quickly is often to decide without all the right people or right information (the next two decisions before the decision) involved, and increases the likelihood of making a regrettable decision.

The key question to first ask is when do we need to make this decision. Sometimes that is a few weeks off, other times it's "by the weekend" or "before this board meeting coming up" or "within the quarter." Getting very specific about when you must decide helps organize the rest of your decision-making process. Sometimes the initial answer to this question is vague, or just involves the general nagging feeling of needing to make a decision. Or perhaps an “opportunity cost” scoreboard is ticking down in some leader’s mind who is pushing for a decision. Deciding when to make the decision by (if not before) helps turn all this confusion into clarity, for yourself and those who decide with you.

The right PEOPLE means asking "Who do we need to include in the decision?"

Although second in the process, even more important than when to make the decision, is who you decide it with. You may include a few others in the first decision already, so you have ahead start. This is not just about ownership of the decision, it is about improving your decision-making process in a variety of ways.

Getting the right people in the room, it is said, is half of leadership. It might be more than half of good decision-making. A sort of "balance of powers" happens when you get the right people in the room, which can help test and approve of your decision, especially for intuitive leaders who are tempted to make those decisions solely based on instinct. As Jonathan Haidt said in The Righteous Mind…

"If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning...." 

What's more, those you involve in the decision should have some differences which help amplify more insightful thinking. That's why Haidt also says, "it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth... or to produce good public policy.” That diversity of opinion, perspective, and/or experience helps identify blind spots and open up other options. As Daniel Kahneman says in Thinking, Fast and Slow…

"It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”

So get some people together that might recognize your mistakes, or you're bound to keep making them.

The right DATA means asking "What choices are before us and what information influences the decision?"

Part of why you need the right TIME and the right PEOPLE is to get the right DATA to make the decision. You'll need time to pull together the best information together to discern your options. Oftentimes, as Steven Sample says in The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, “deciding when to decide” gives you time to not only pull the best extant information together, but some information may even emerge in the intervening time which makes the right decision more obvious or clear.

It can be helpful to break down the decision-making process into multiple moments, where an early conversation or meeting identifies merely what information would help make the decision. This information could be financial reports or budgets, research, opinion polls, demographic intel, informal interviews, expert analysis, etc. The other thing such a "preliminary meeting" can assist in is identifying what options are before you, at a moment when nobody is "choosing up teams" for which to argue. Helping a group or team brainstorm all the options before advocating for any one of them helps everyone know that many options will be considered, and more blue sky dreaming is welcome.

The right RESULTS means asking "Where do the options lead, including unintended consequences?"

The options you've considered lead somewhere. It can be helpful in decision-making to get specific about the results you aim for them to get you. You're deciding to get a certain result, not merely to be "done with the decision." Some people consider themselves to be decisive, when they're really just reckless, or cannot hold tension together in their minds for long enough to understand the unintended consequences of their own decisions. This step ensures you've thought through where the decisions might lead, and how much risk those decisions put you in. Sometimes you need to decide to do something with a potentially large unintended bad consequence, but the upside is so large you're willing to risk it, personally or professionally. The only bad decision in such a case is going into such a decision blind to the consequences of it.

Once you've done this, you can plan out your actual execution related to those options to get the results you're looking for.

“Execution [is] the missing link between aspirations and results.... If you don’t know how to execute, the whole of your effort as a leader will always be less than the sum of its parts” (see Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done).

All too often we think making the decision is the biggest part, when in reality we need to understand the way our decisions should dovetail with follow-through to achieve the results the decision is intended to generate. Making this clear during the decision-making process makes that more possible, even before the final decision is made.

The right RESPONSE means asking "How will we react to events with pre-planned contingencies?"

Before the decision is final, one last decision-before the decision can be helpful, and that is to think through events that may follow the decision with the right response to them. This includes the unintended consequences of a decision you've itemized in the prior step. Remember, once you know of unintended consequences, they're no longer, in fact, unintended consequences, they are intentional risks or mitigated consequences. Shauna Niequist reports a friend told her…

“It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”

Some unintentional consequences you itemize are just deciding what you are willing to give up if it comes down to it.

This final phase can be particularly helpful when you are arriving at a final decision, but it’s not “in concrete” yet. This is where you play with the decision as though it's already made even though it's not. Some people report that in this phase you can "feel a peace" about the decision once you talk through it as though it's done, even though it's not. Other times, while thinking through the reactions to the decision and the events that transpire, they cause you to rethink the decision at a penultimate moment. But hopefully, this phase confirms that you have a plan for the decision to work and you gain confidence and clarity about the decision.

What’s next?

After making these decisions before the decision it's just a matter of firming up the decision, ensuring the right people in the room either all agree, or agree to support it outside the room if even if they argued against it in the process, and then appropriately communicate the decision and execute around it. But many have written on those subjects elsewhere. I just thought I'd add to your toolbox these decisions before the decision since so few explore them in our journey to become better decision-makers. I hope it helps you have more confidence and clarity in your decision-making.

If you have an interest in this subject or in following up on any of the sources I quoted above, here is some further reading:

• The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership by Steven Sample

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman 

• Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee

• Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way by Shauna Niequist

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan