What do you do all day? I’m not asking what is on your calendar. I know it is filled with meetings, calls, presentations, etc. etc. But, why? What are you, as a senior business executive, trying to accomplish with all of these appointments? What is your role in your organization? What is your essential function?
Okay, leading questions like that are really annoying. But, hey, it got your attention. I would submit that almost everything on your calendar involves making a decision, implementing a decision, evaluating the results of a decision, or communicating a decision. So, outside of a few distractions, you exist in your organization to make decisions. You are a Chief Decision Maker.
Having come this far in your career, you probably have your own decision making style based on what has worked for you in the past. And, you would not be here today if you made poor decisions. But, what if you could do even better? What if your board of directors knew you for the intelligence of your decisions? What if your competitors immediately scrambled to catch up whenever you made a strategic move? What if your team really bought into the decisions they helped make and felt good about the directions that you decide to go in? What if you could reduce doubt and uncertainty and sleep better at night?
Decision making is such an essential function that you would assume there would be tons of information on the subject. And, well , actually, there is. Try searching for “Executive Decision Making”. Yes, you will get lots of hits. But, if you read through them, you will find that all the links seem to gravitate to two extremes:
- 1. High level generic advice on decision making processes or frameworks
- 2. Extremely academic treatments (basically papers on statistical techniques)
The first category mostly consists of the same few pieces of information repackaged over and over. Read a couple of the articles and you will be well versed in generic decision frameworks, decision making styles, and avoidance of biases. (You will also receive a lot of information on why making good decisions is important – just in case the idea was new to you.)
The academic treatments explore topics like decision spaces, loss functions, propagation of uncertainty, etc. You will never, ever have the time to read these references. And even if you did, they are so academic that you would not be very much closer to answering the question:
How do you actually go about making a big important decision and feel good about it?
In other words…How do you equitably combine judgment and analytics when making decisions? How do you quantitatively evaluate options and assign probabilities of success under different scenarios? How do you objectively combine the opinions of colleagues and experts? How do you know what information you will need to make a rational decision, how much of it you will need, how much you should pay for it, and how to find it? When do you need to toss out all options under consideration and try something entirely new? And, how do you communicate a decision once it is made?
I think the lack of solid resources comes down to the fact that the middle ground i.e. information that is technical enough to be useful but not so technical that it cannot be implemented is a tough subject. So, most stick to the extremes – either generic enough that it is easy to write about or so academic that one never has to worry about applying it. Or, maybe another way to put it would be that those who just want to write an article that gains eyeballs are not willing to tackle the hard stuff and those who are willing, REALLY want to tackle it.
In this series of blog posts, we are going to try to bridge that middle ground. Stay tuned….