4- Making Decisions: Squint Your Eyes and Pull the Trigger

Decision making is a skill. Learning how to make fast confident decisions can set you apart from the crowd and make you a valued voice of reason on your team. While others will debate and waffle on their opinions, you can show your leadership by making your mind up quickly and moving forward with an action plan to boost the team’s productivity.

Learning how to process lots of information, weigh and balance multiple options, and cut through the clutter (in that order) isn’t easy. However, with a few simple tools and principles, you can learn how to squint your eyes and pull the trigger.

This photograph, “a view through a scope,” is copyright The Marlow Rifle & Pistol Club, and used under a Creative Commons License.

Some will say that being able to make good quick decisions comes with experience. There is some truth to that; experience is valuable because it gives you a better perspective of possible pitfalls and successes in your field. But usually, knowing the right answers to the kind of questions that are aided by experience just means that you’ve been around long enough to know what’s been done before and can decide if that worked well or failed miserably. There is little skill in that, and so making “experience” decisions is not really rewarded by superiors with any special notice.

Anyone can make the “We did that before and it cost us time and money! Don’t ever do it again” kind of decision. It’s being able to make the “This has never been done before, the stakes are high if we win but the penalty is high if we lose” kind of decisions that will set you apart.

Here is how expert decision makers get it done…

Save the drama for your momma

Whether it’s Honey Boo Boo, Macbeth, the Book of Job, Zeus and Sisyphus, or Egyptian Hieroglyphs, cultures for centuries have demanded conflict and resolution to spice up their lives. People thrive on drama… So as office life is such a big part of our time, recognize your coworkers’ natural need to create drama. Everyone wants to be the hero of their own life’s tragedy, and so in order to make that play a good one, they need to create more drama! When making decisions, stick to the facts and cut out the drama.

Use a decision matrix

A decision matrix is a quick way to collect all of the possible outcomes and get them in front of you so you can compare and contrast them efficiently. There are many resources out there that provide decision matrices designed to evaluate multiple decisions with several complex facets, rank them on scales according to risk and success factors, and boil them down into numerical comparisons to help make decisions. However, I recommend you stick to the K.I.S.S. principle (Keep it simple, stupid!). Take each decision one at a time, focus on the facts and outcomes of each one, and then make separate comparisons.

Let’s use a 2 x 2 window decision matrix to help solve a real-world example. Let’s say you are an architect and you’re building a new 10-story office building. Your client wants a big open view for his lakefront property with floor to ceiling windows, so the selection of a cladding system has become one of the more critical components of the design. The project is also over budget and the owner is pressuring you to save money and keep the project on track. A new vendor approaches you about a new window system they developed that they claim will change the way windows are designed in the future. It offers unobstructed views at half the cost of normal windows, but is new to the market and doesn’t have much of a track record. It would save the owner substantial money and make your firm look brilliant – or it could fall short on one of the owner’s most critical needs.

Should you use the new window system? Let’s look at the window example and fill out the matrix. Cut out the drama associated with a major component failure on a large project and just consider the good and bad outcomes for each side of the decision.

Accept that there is no right answer…

Every decision has good and bad outcomes for both sides of the decision. Once you grasp the concept that there’s really no right or wrong answer, it takes all the stress out of making the right decision. There will be upsides and downsides to each decision you make, so all you’ve got to do is separate them out and review the impact of the tangible ($$$) and intangible (relationships, PR) effects of each outcome.

The matrix is just a simple way to get all of the drama corralled into a pen so you can you handle each one at a time. Then just need to weigh whether the good outcomes are worth the risk compared to the possible bad outcomes.

What if the new window systems fail? Sure, it’s a possibility. What is the vendor’s warranty? If they fail, will they replace the windows with a proven system? Will they reimburse for lost time and productivity resulting from their product failure? Depending on negotiations with the vendor, they may be able to reduce the impact of this possible bad outcome by developing contingency plans ahead of time.

What if you damage the relationship with your current supplier? Your firm has used them for decades and you have special pricing on other key products. It is possible that damaging that relationship will affect the bigger business picture, and there’s too much to risk by switching to a new vendor. Maybe that outcome has the highest risk for your firm. By separating it out in the matrix, you can consider it independently and evaluate options and contingencies to lessen the impact.

They key point is to separate emotion from the decision, lay out the facts, and weigh the tangible and intangible impacts one at a time.

What decision are you making today?