Are decisions that important?

Think about a decision you made recently — something that didn’t have an obvious choice.

For me, I had to decide if I would publish this post or not. I think it will be interesting to read, but I have no way of knowing for sure. I can only work with the information I have. People have told me they enjoyed reading previous posts. I enjoyed writing this one. Those are good indicators. Still, I’m taking a chance.

We make decisions like this every day without any way to know exactly how they’ll turn out.

After I write this I’m going to do some work to help me see if it was a good decision. I’ll send it through my newsletter. A few days after that, I’ll post it on LinkedIn and Medium. I’ll tag people I think might like it. I’ll make sure to respond to any feedback and comments along the way.

The work I do after the decision has a lot more lasting impact than the decision itself. I might learn that it doesn’t really resonate with people. Or maybe it does. That will be new information I’ll consider when writing my next post.

I had a boss once who was very involved in the day to day. He always asked questions and wanted to know the latest information. He was also known to change his mind — a lot. One day something was the top priority and a week later it was something else.

Many of us would complain behind his back about all this zig-zagging. It was frustrating to work that way.

During a team meeting, that boss seemed to sense our frustration. He paused for a moment and said, with no anger or accusation in his voice, “I reserve the right to change my mind when I receive new information.”

Since then, I’ve always questioned whether decisions on their own were that important. There’s no way of knowing exactly how a decision will play out. It’s a best guess based on the information available at the time.

Throughout my career, I’ve watched people and teams, including myself, overvalue decisions.

Many organizations do hierarchical decision making. Teams discuss something and gather information. After that they “run it by leadership”. This involves getting a sliver of time in some upcoming “leadership meeting” which might be weeks away. The meeting eventually rolls around and the ship of leaders makes a decision based on incomplete information.

Decision in hand, the team forges ahead to carry out that decision. They’ll do the work to make it a “right” decision, but they’ll be closed off to any new information that might warrant a change in direction. If there is any new information, it means getting another sliver of ship time in some future meeting. The cycle of uninformed decisions repeats, with teams sitting around and waiting in between.

I’ve also worked with teams where decisions weren’t the top priority. Instead, they were a way to figure something out — more like a hypothesis or experiment.

Those teams make faster, smaller decisions, using what they learn between each one to inform the next one. It’s like dribbling a soccer ball across a soccer field to score a goal. They can course correct over and over and give themselves a great chance of scoring. Hierarchical ship decision making is like winding up at one end of the field and trying to blast the ball all the way to the goal at the other end. It might go in, but there’s no chance to course correct if it’s offline.

Teams that dribble the ball usually have leaders that either get directly involved or get out of the way. They work faster and more efficiently, resulting in far more breakthrough ideas and goals reached. They lower the stakes on decisions and prioritize the work in between each one. They get closer to “right” much faster, through iteration and learning. To them, decisions aren’t that important.

I’d love to know what you think about this idea so I can factor it into my next post.

Are decisions that important?