5 Ideas To Improve Your Decision Making

Morning Leaders,

Hindsight is 20-20.

It’s so much easier to assess and evaluate a decision or situation once it’s passed. We naturally have a tendency to kick ourselves when we make mistakes and give ourselves a hard time.

But remember, every decision we make whether it’s good or bad, is based on the facts or data we had in front of us and our own interpretation of the event at the time.

Once we have made a decision and see the events unfold we’ll acquire more insight and knowledge which we didn’t have before, or didn’t know where to look.

Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash

You cannot change the past and it’s a waste of energy dwelling on it. It’s important to evaluate where you went wrong, should you have reviewed better data, rather than more data? Could you have got a different perspective from a colleague? Could you have asked a mentor? Whatever the opportunities are, you can use them to adjust your process and learn for next time.

This is a constructive way of setting yourself up for success in the future by reviewing the situation in the right way.

Here are 5 ideas to improve your success when making decisions:

1) Work with a seasoned pro - whether it’s your Leader, a Mentor, Coach or even someone who has a lot more experience than you, bounce your ideas or thinking off someone who has navigated the path you’re on and knows the pitfalls. Not only lean on their experience but get them to challenge and poke holes in your idea or decision. You will elevate your level of thinking and perspective to a ridiculous level by learning from those who have more experience than you. Don’t reinvent the wheel, save yourself some time by spending time with people who are 10-15 years more experienced than you.

2) Start small, and then scale - reduce the risk of your decision by starting with a pilot or a small group first, and get feedback. Essentially you want to fail quickly and look for the things that don’t work. This pilot will give you immediate feedback if you are on the right path or you need to adjust your approach. If you start too big and get it wrong, the pain is going to be tremendous. On the other hand, if you just have a small group, you will be able to pivot quickly and be more nimble, and you can also start from scratch without incurring significant time and cost. Once you have ironed out all the kinks with the small group, start increasing the group size gradually and then you can scale to a much larger group.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

3) Take Action - you have to make decisions. When you first start out in life you make some bad decisions. But through failing, learning, experiences and feedback you refine your decision-making process and your quality of decision improves. Like anything, making more decisions helps you practice and get better.

4) Closest to the problem - Steve Jobs used to go and speak to people closest to the problem. Don’t always rely on what others tell you, validate things yourself. Where possible, go to the source of the problem and speak to people closest to it. Encourage them to speak up and be candid as you want to learn and improve things. You’ll be amazed at what you will learn, and this will also help you make better decisions to ensure you make the right call which fixes the root cause and not a symptom of the root cause.

5) Introspection - all great leaders self reflect, whether that’s dedicated thinking time, journaling or a debrief post-decision. You have to evaluate your decision making and why sometimes you get things wrong. Adopting a Growth Mindset will propel you forward and help you recognise failure is part of the journey. The process of assessing where you didn’t meet the grade will help you dramatically to learn and adjust your approach for next time, which will inevitably lead to far greater success in whatever your endeavour.

Making decisions can be tough, but that is part of leadership. You are not always going to make the right call every time and you are not always going to be everyone’s favourite for the decision you make.

As long as your decisions are made with a logical thought process, have the right spirit and intend, and you learn from your previous failures, you will improve more and more over time.

It’s the leader who makes decisions, regularly evaluates and then pivots quickly who are the most successful. Not those who sit on the fence waiting for things to unfold and get worst.

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Leadership Community - we’re launching a Leadership Community in February. This will be a private safe place for leaders and aspiring leaders to calibrate and improve as a group. It will include a knowledge base of resources, Slack Group, Monthly Q&As and Book Clubs. If you are interested in joining to develop your leadership and professional skills for a small investment within a nurturing, positive and supportive environment, please register your interest here.

• YouTube Video - Simon Sinek explains why Leadership is like Parenting. What it takes to be a leader and why you should consider if it’s for you. You also need to be obsessed with it and have a constant willingness to learn and grow.

• YouTube Video - Jack Welch - What is the role of the leader? Jack was a hugely successful leader at GE. He talks through the importance of finding meaning in your team’s work, and why as leaders we need to remove blockers from our team’s environment to ensure they can be successful.

• Book - Matthew Syed - Black Box Thinking When incidents happen on an aircraft, investigators learn a lot from the black box onboard. This forms much of the theory behind this great book. What can we learn from evaluating the data from our everyday life? How can we use this data to improve ourselves, just like investigators use data from black boxes to improve the safety of aviation. A very eye opening read illustrating a shocking disparity in how different industries such as aviation and healthcare approach and learn from failure.

Quote of the Week

“Life is filled with difficult decisions, and winners are those who make them.” - Dan Brown

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