How to Make a Decision

If you want to become the worst leader in history, don’t ever make any decisions. As a leader, this is basically your bread and butter. Making the call (and taking the fall) is what you get paid for.

Making decisions is hard work though. Everyone wants to make the right call at the right time, and nobody wants to be the goat, especially if it means that your team will suffer for it. Many, many people have developed countless techniques and methods to help you make the right call. Most of them do little to help with the actual decision at hand.

What they do in spades however is make you feel better about the choices you make. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not that’s a good thing. Feeling good about your decision is one thing, and I’d suggest doing whatever it is you like best. The more important issue though is making the right call. The only way you’ll do that is with a combination of experience, instinct and process.

Personally, when I find myself in a position where I need to make a decision, I tend to use the following process. I’d recommend it to anyone if you haven’t already found one of your own that works consistently.

Scope the Decision

The first thing you should do is properly scope your decision. In a single phrase, what’s the decision you have to make? What are the outcomes you are choosing between? Is this the right decision to be making, or is it only a symptom of a larger call that you - or somebody else - is putting off? Make sure you’re making the right call on the right thing.

Along with this, you should take a few minutes to evaluate your authority to make the decision. Are you the right person to make this call? If not, who should? Be careful though not to use your perceived lack of authority to avoid the problem altogether. Unless you know that your superiors will get thoroughly upset that you didn’t consult with them prior to making the decision, buck up and take action.

Gather Information

Once you’ve assumed authority and defined the decision to be made, start to gather as much information about the problem your decision is expected to resolve. The amount of information to be gathered directly corresponds to the immediacy and importance of the decision being made. On one hand, strategic and large impact decisions can benefit from using a SWOT analysis or similar tool, while immediate and tactical decisions will use less formal techniques, such as a brainstorming session.

The important thing here is to limit your information gathering to the scope of the problem. If you are doing a SWOT analysis to decide what outfit to wear to a meeting, you’re gathering too much information. You’ll never have all the information, learn to act without it.

Forecast Expected Outcomes

Once you’ve learned as much as you can - given constraints - about an issue, it’s time to forecast the expected outcomes of your options. For a great many people, this involves a simple pro/con list. It gets a little ridiculous when you start adding numbers and looking for some mathematical formula for the “best” decision. To each their own though.

Myself, I paint three scenarios: best case, worst case, and mean/average outcome. I’ve outlined a simple version of this below for the trivial problem of whether or not to wear a suit to a client meeting:

For most decisions that you make, either the best or worst case will be something you will want to avoid completely. In the case above, it looks like if I needed to make a mistake, I’d be better off overdressed. (FYI: You almost always are!)

There are two other components to the process here that are often key to arriving at the correct course of action, as well as often overlooked in the classic mathematical methods. Instinct and experience are valuable allies when making a decision and should never be overlooked. Often, a gut feel is the only distinguishing factor between two choices of equal merit. Gained experience will enhance your instincts and give you a better feel for a situation based on similar occurrences in the past. Both are instrumental in the process and should never be overlooked.

Sleep on It

In my former life as a soldier, I could only dream of having the luxury of this much time in making a decision. Making major decisions with life or death consequences is par for the course in that environment, and the stress is almost unbearable. Working in a business environment, it’s truly rare when you can’t say, “Let me get back to you tomorrow.” Nothing is so earth shatteringly urgent that it can’t bare some sober second thought.

While sleeping on it is great taken literally, what you’re really trying to accomplish here is the act of stepping away from the problem after thinking it through initially, then resuming the process. With my example above, for instance, it may seem on first glance that wearing a suit is the best option. Perhaps though you are a designer, and your brand is hip and edgy. After sleeping on it, you return to the process with the thinking that wearing a suit takes away from your brand, and thus the image you want to portray.

In the least, sleeping on an issue gives you extra confidence in your first instinct, and is a great way to allow yourself the freedom to make a gut call.

Act!

Finally, all of the above is for naught if you don’t actually carry through with your thinking and act. This is by far the hardest of the steps, and also the most important. Often, we know exactly what needs to be done, having analyzed it over and over in our heads, but by never acting, we never make the decision.

Once you have chosen, it’s important to always look forward. Pause for analysis of past turning points only as a means of self improvement, and never as a part of future decision processes. In other words, don’t get into the trap of the Sunk cost fallacy with your decision making.

I’ve used this technique to make some very major choices in my personal and professional life. Although I’ve sometimes made the “wrong” decision, I’ve always been comfortable in acting on future choices because of the strength of this solid thought process.