Transcript
Ricklefs: Why are we here? Decision making is arguably the most important job of the senior executive, and one of the easiest to get wrong. Decision making is really difficult. I even was listening to an interview by Jeff Bezos, he said that the more senior you get, it's all about making one or two good decisions per day. What's going on? Why is this so hard? The way the research that I quoted earlier phrases it, is that we argue our positions with a passion that really prevents us from weighing up opposing views. We downplay our position's weakness, and we boost our chance to winning, because what happens quite often is that decision making can turn into this battle of wills, which then discourages your innovative thinking. It stifles diverse and valuable viewpoints.
However, let's turn this round. Let's carefully consider a variety of options, collaborate on those options to then stimulate creative thinking. Putting options on the table, I think really permits sufficient evaluation and ensure you can make the best choices. The payoff, they say, and I also believe this, is really high-quality decision that advance you, your team's, or your organization's objectives. You can do this in a timely manner and implement it effectively.
Time is of the essence here. What's going on? Most treat decision making as an event. It's a discrete choice that takes place at a single point in time, whether you are at your desk, whether you're in your meeting, whether you're starting a spreadsheet, writing a line of code. However, most decision making is not an event. It's a process, one that unfolds over weeks, years, months even. It's fraught with power plays, politics. We've got these personal nuances that people bring, and I'll show you where they come from. It's all full of discussions, debate, and ultimately, the bigger the decision, it really requires support from the whole organization when it comes to execution.
Let's look at some data. Here's some research that analyzed about 1000 decisions, and what they concluded is that process mattered far more than the quantity of the analysis by a factor of 6. It's important to say that analysis isn't important. It's absolutely crucial, however, and what they've seen is that no decision made it through their sample set when it was based on poor analysis.
It's still really important. This other research here looked at 83. You can think, that's a pretty small number. No, it's actually quite significant, because it was executive decisions that they looked at, 43 of these were of really high complexity. By that, we mean uncertainty, time pressure, big consequences. I looked at the result after 7 years to go and see, was that poor? Was it satisfactory? Was it very good? You can see by actually moving to three options what that meant. Just I think that the percentage from 83 down to 26 hopefully shows you how important that is. There is additional research that I'm not quoting here, which was done in U.S. firms, where they looked at 400 decisions across various different sized companies, and they saw similar jumps, in particular around the poor performance. The more options you consider, the better it turns out to be.
What I'm going to do in this talk is to give you a bit of a perspective of the different dynamics that are going on in decision making. On the one hand, there are the aspects that will inform the quality of your decision, so let's call that the science. What's important when we look at the quality of decision, it's the data you use. It's the process of your decision. It's also the reasoning that you go about when you make your decision.
On the other hand, there are people involved. You heard it from Jeremy, people is the most important thing. I think it came through in our previous talks as well. How do you get the people involved? Let's call that the psychology. That's your team. It's you as an individual. It's the organization. There are many other things you can throw in, the market, your competitors. I hope I give you a couple of tips and tricks that really bring together intuitive and analytical approaches, provide a process that tries to really highlight where the biases are coming from that we bring into decision making, and show you a view of how you can actually fairly review your option.
Scope
Let's start with the individual. Actually, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with myself. I'm going to give you a lot of context about why, and what I'm basing all of this on. We all have a different frame of reference. That's based on our upbringing, our cultures, our work, and that's what we bring to work every single day. I grew up in Germany. Spent my university life here in the UK. I have a BSc in Computer Science from Kent, and a Master's in Computer Animation in Bournemouth. These studies, I think, really, have given me my craft. They're my core skills that I use and apply in a technical environment where I spent most of my career. The information about this talk, though, is of things that I kept on learning at places like the London School of Economics, Cambridge University, a lot of reading on the subject, and also becoming a coach.
I'll do run through some of the work out of my work experience, pretty much, but it's really to highlight the types of decisions that have been involved in my day-to-day. I actually started as a paramedic back in Germany, which I think to this day, has given me a really serious appreciation around resilience. This might sound awkward, but as hard and stressful as our work get, nobody is going to die at the end. What the key decisions were here is, how do I ensure I'm safe myself? Number one priority.
How do I make sure that I can get the patient safely either into hospital, or that they're safe to continue at home? It also showed me the importance of really clear process and really clear criteria for how do you make your decisions? I started work for Sun Microsystems as an engineer, and that was in Silicon Valley, which is now the Facebook Campus, apparently. It shows you how things change. It was an exploratory area focusing around knowledge management. They were huge back then, like 45,000, 60,000 people.
One of the big problems is that everybody was repeating the same things over again. I looked after numerous technology decisions, best approaches for how do you make sure people across the organization know what's going on? How can you make sure that we're not duplicating stuff? However, building websites and databases wasn't my forte, so I decided to come back to the UK and do that master's in computer animation. I spent pretty much a decade in visual effects at a company called the Moving Picture Company, which was a massive story of like growth, so across people, locations, technology, the scale of the operation. There we were. We had one office in Soho when I started. We worked on two projects at any given point in time. We were 250 people.
When I left, we were 3500 people worldwide, 10 offices, and that was India, Europe, America, Canada. We worked across 20 projects at a given point in time. It made MPC actually one of the biggest visual effects houses in the world. Here, my decisions became more about focusing, how do you grow engineering in an organization, how do you include your research? How do you enable a fully 24/7 production pipeline back and forth? Then, also, how do you build multiple teams across multiple different locations, to ensure that your technology continuously evolves? I'm now at the BBC, working with the great Tanja, having done various roles, from technical strategy to research. I'm now on the production side.
I look after all of the lovely backend systems that power the BBC's digital portfolio, so all the lovely products that I hope you all use on a daily basis. Now my decisions are a lot more about translating strategic vision. How do you evolve both the technical and the organizational structures and the architecture to fulfill those.
I have hobbies. One of my big hobbies is gardening. I was recently just potting along some sweet peas that are coming along, and my daughter came in and really said, "Papa, I think I just spotted you in your happy place." I think it's just really important to always know where is that happy place for you, outside, inside of work. From gardening, I really learned to look more holistically at what is needed to make a project or team successful. This rose I have moved about three times in the past 8 years, and it's only these types of flowers that it was able to produce last year.
Why is that? Because this time I really looked at the Earth, the light, the food, the water, the neighboring plants that needed to be there for it to flourish. I think that's a really important aspect. You need to look at all of the various different options that go into even your decision making. It also made me realize the importance of thinking in timeframes, so what needs to happen today? What can wait a week? What do I need to change, the season?
What are the big architectural changes that I need to make? What's the potential impact on the ecosystem? The final thing is scouting. Scouting is all about embracing inclusivity and diversity to create fun adventures and skills for life. I also believe that children are the future. I might not be able to change the world, but I can inspire a child to do so. There you go. Absolutely worth it. Running a scouting section involves the continuous planning of the actual program. It's very diverse what we need to do. How to grow, find new volunteers. Also, on a daily basis, need to run risk assessment, and it's all helped, so very clear guidelines and values.
That was me. There are many facets that make you as an individual, and I highly encourage you to try and find out more about each other and the teams that you're working on. Really look into what's going on in your personal life. One potential way to do this, and you might be wondering, what are all these squares? This is what we call in coaching a frame of reference. I invite you to start drawing something like this, and draw out boxes that represent the phases in your life.
You might start with the inner box, that's your childhood, and then you go outwards. You can start to draw things out. Listen, check what's coming up. Why am I putting things at the top, at the bottom? On a high level, I put my life events here. I put my interest, hobbies, and passions to the left. My education, my work at the top. Then, at the bottom, my family and friends. That's just me. You might be doing something differently.
Personality (Psychology) Types
This might be a little bit more familiar. I'm really curious, has anyone done any of these personality or psychology tests here? Out of all of you, who have done at least two of these or three or more? Do remember that these are signals at any given point in time. They will most likely be different if you would have done them before or after lunch. There's some really fascinating research around that. They might be different after a long day of work, after a difficult meeting. Whenever you do these, read, reflect, what is surprising, what was expected. I've done pretty much all of these, and there definitely are patterns in the thing that I see when doing these, and I think that's the important bit. I was going to just run you through what they actually look like.
This one is called TetraMapping. What they say is that TetraMapping is a learning experience that encourages potential and strengthens leaders in teams. I'll show you an example where we're using one of these to actually work with a quite senior team, and I can show you what that looks like. It's a simple approach that really builds trust, develops empathy, and collaborative relationships. I did this with my coworker, and it's fascinating. You might look at, what on earth is he talking about? Each of these elements, TetraMapping says there are four, represent us as individuals. It's important we all have these.
The difference is that some might become more natural to you, and others, you might actually just be whoever. They don't come as natural to you. They also all have a positive and a potential negative aspect to them. I'm apparently full of water. What it means is I'm caring, I'm considerate, consistent, but I can also be hesitant, neglect objectives, be potentially quite sensitive. There's fire. I'm spontaneous. It does sound cool to be full of fire. Spontaneous, positive, the possibilities, but also easily distracted. I know I can be very easily distracted if something really exciting comes about.
The Earth is all about decisive, facts, full of confidence, too demanding, potentially. Then, air is all being orderly, focused, logical. Then, on the other hand, I could come across as potentially very critical. Water and fire are actually my predominant aspects. As I said, we're working with these things also to look at the whole team. I think Peter, in his talk right at the beginning, said one of the most important things as a leader is to build a high-performing team. Here's an example of doing the so-called CliftonStrengths with a team to go and see, what does it look like? Where are our predominant aspects? As you can see here, strategic thinking. This is a really quite senior team. Actually, you couldn't expect strategic thinking to be right at the top here.
What does that mean? Let's just reflect. Does that mean we might have what doesn't come as easy to us if that team needs to influence someone. That's really important. Here is then playing that through to a team that supports this particular team. What's happening, if you paid attention to the numbers on the top right, we're now seeing that there are more emphasis on relationship building rather than on the execution. Again, quite limited in terms of influencing. It's all just being aware, where are my strengths? Where are areas that I need to like see, because we might not be considering them as much? That's the really important thing.
Transactional Analysis
For several years, I've been really interested in people's behavior at work. I had the opportunity last year to be trained as a coach. That was done predominantly on something called transactional analysis. Transactional analysis is one of the mostly widely respected psychological guides to understand your human feelings, thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. It's been really amazing. It's given me some fascinating insights of how we behave at work and even in life. It's a lovely statement that they use, or phrase. Often, all it takes is a little awareness of how we are behaving. Awareness gives you a choice, and with that choice comes the freedom to act differently. That's really, if I want you to take one thing away, reflect. Reflect on the things you say, reflect on what people are saying in meetings that you're in.
There are three important things that I think are important when it comes to decision making. The first is, they refer to these as the so-called ego states. They're called, P is parent, A is adult, and C is child, which investigate how we communicate with each other. All these three types are responses based on behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. However, the parent state is what you might have had experience as a child from your parent or parent led figures. Adult is the here and now, and that's the important one that we want to be in whenever we are in conversations or in discussions. Then the child is like how you might have responded in the childhood. Parent can be quite authoritative. My child response can be very disruptive. That's definitely how my kids continuously interact with me. It's just being aware of what state you're in.
There are also drivers quite similar to the personality types I talked about, and what they say is that these are your powerful unconscious motivators which you learned while you're growing up. They tend to surface in particular when under pressure, and under challenge. I'd be happy to share that I am, be perfect and please other, which is a rather tricky combination, because what that means is I never say no, and then I want to do everything at the highest standard.
I also know that when I work with someone who comes across as a hurry up driver, my be perfect driver is going to be challenged. Because it's like, no, we're way too quick. We haven't analyzed this and this. The final aspect is what's referred to as the OK Corral, and this is our attitudes within discussions. What this is basically saying is, when you are in the conversations, go and reflect back and go and say, are we not aligned? Am I not understanding you? Are you not understanding myself? Are we both completely different, or are we in a state that we know, ok, you understand where I come from, and I understand where you're coming from, so we're in a much better path of going forward.
Judgments and Biases
Why am I telling you all of this? Because when it comes to decision making, one of the hardest things to try and identify are these judgments, are these biases that have come into the decision-making process. Unlike, if there are certain fields, finance, marketing in particular, where executives are really looking to psychology to make the most out of biases residing in others. When we're in the decision making, we need to reflect on the biases that are in ourselves, and that's really quite difficult. I'll run you through a couple of these biases so you can see what that means. I'll start with this research. It's from 1988. If you run this today, you still get very similar results. The numbers I'm going to show you is based on when I did this one. The task is, you need to say, was that a good decision or not when you get given the whole outline of the scenario.
Basically, it's a 55-year-old man, has a heart condition. You have the chance of a bypass, will increase your life expectancy by 5 years. This person is 55, and has got 8% people who have this operation die. We got given a scale to say, yes, that decision was clearly incorrect, 0 was ok, and then 3 was clearly correct. Here are the scores, and you might already guess what's going on. Group A scored the outcome that was given to them as a 2, so really quite correct.
The other one, B, it's at 0.75, so neutral. What was going on here? The result that we were all told was, Group A, the process was a success. Group B, unfortunately the patient died. We're told, unfortunately the patient died, here are the criteria, what do we think? Good, bad decision? What this basically tells us is that we naturally focus our attention on the factors favorable to one decision over another. This can be potentially quite catastrophic.
This article right here, they look at a pilot that was flying the normal route. Storms started to appear. The training says, no, don't fly that route. The person did it. They flew on. Nothing happened. That decision to take the flight was very risky, and the pilot might have avoided it through whatever circumstances. Maybe it's just a lucky coincidence. Thanks to outcome bias, what this might mean that in the future, they just rely on that information again to just completely say there is no danger at all when they come to these dangerous decisions. This is taken further in things like government. Here is this numerous literature around this, kind of like behavioral science and decision making.
This report states, governments are increasingly using behavioral insights to design, enhance, and reassess their policies and services. However, elected and unelected government officials are themselves influenced by the same heuristics and the same biases that they try to address in others. Actually, it goes into quite a lot of detail. If you are interested, this is a really good summary of what's going on. They showed where those biases come in, and how can they start addressing this, in particular, when you look at policy making. You notice, you deliberate, and you execute. There's biases littered all over this.
There are numerous biases in literature, and this is just a selection that tend to appear in decision making around work related situations. There's things like pattern recognition. These are things that lead us to believe there are patterns, if there are none. Action orientated ones, they drive us to action less thoughtful than we actually really should. Social biases. They arise from the preference over harmony, rather than conflict. Your stability one, we tend to like the current situation, in particular, when we talk about uncertainty that could come for depending on what the situation is. There's interests, and that might be monetary or non-monetary. There might be purely emotional interests that are driving your decisions.
What do they look like? The first one, and one that I think everyone in literature wants to get rid of is this notion of overconfidence. We tend to be overly confident in our skills, and that's in relation to others. That then relates to predicting future outcomes. I think it's also a really good example of how your drivers can actually bring out certain biases. For example, be strong and hurry up, is very closely linked to action bias. That can result to drive to action, although we haven't considered all the various different options. It's linked to overestimation. Thinking you're better than you really are, thinking you're better than others, or thinking that you know more than you actually do. There's another bias called under-confidence, which is the complete opposite. There is confirmation, that we seek information from others that might be in similar situations.
Let me give you this example. Let's say there is a CEO who's considering canceling a planned expansion. They go to an acquaintance, that acquaintance, turns out, has just canceled such an expansion. What do you think the advice is going to be? To cancel. Always look out for, who am I asking? Have I got all the information? Avoid the people that you know will say yes to certain things, or actually ask a colleague of yours to argue against your decision. Really powerful. Sunk cost, which means we're looking or making choices in the way that justifies some things we've done in the past.
I heard one of the reasons that the Concorde took so long to be decommissioned is because of the amount of money, the excellence, and engineering that's gone on, rather than going at the economics, that is, actually losing money at those points in time. You've, I think, all been on projects where you go, it's like, we spent all of this time and effort onto it, but we're not looking at the here and now to see, it's like, how would that actually help us to move on?
Always get people from the outside that haven't been part of your situation, actually set out some dates to really go and compare these things more holistically. Also, I think, and this is important, just look into why was that earlier decision, why did I recognize that mistake, and what is that causing inside of me? Remind yourself, everybody here makes a mistake. Don't encourage the failure fear.
There's anchoring. Who here has bought a house, or haggled in a marketplace? You know the importance of that first number, because that anchors, they call it, the position. Tactics here. Figure out what your anchor is. If you go into buying a house, know what you're willing to pay. Where is that line that I'm not going to go over or under? Be open-minded, again, to seek information from others. As I said, generate your own anchor. There's the status quo. It's a tendency to prefer alternatives that are a continuation of the current situation. That is because people tend to find change really quite hard. I go into this in a bit more detail later, but always ask yourself, is the current situation actually really servicing our purpose? The final one is framing. What this is saying is that we react to effectively identical decision problems differently depending on the wording. If I tell you that we're in the situation and we can either prevent layoffs or we can save jobs.
There are two different ways. It's a loss and a gain framing. It's important just to understand which one of these you're going for. What this actually helps with is that when you are in your decision, try to frame it in a different way. Try to frame the decision in a way that is about the negative, is about the gain in the situation, depending of how you start with. There are many of these, and they all come about in decision making. We all have them. It's absolutely normal. The importance here, and the key, I think, takeaway for me is always ask, question these things. Where are these statements coming from? A very good way to do so, and they do this in negotiation and mediation strategies, is to just always follow up these statements with just a simple question of like, can you help me understand, how did that number come about? What are we basing this on? How have you experienced this previously?
Where Do These Biases Come From?
Where do they come from? Now I mentioned, I think they do come from these drivers. They do come from your group dynamics. They come from the various different personality types that we bring in. It's also because we tend to process information in two broad ways. There's, on one hand, this notion of reliance on heuristics. What this means is that we use rule of thumb. That we use our mental shortcuts in particular when we're making judgments or decisions. Then there is a deeper reasoning strategy. You might remember, or have read the book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Also, at the places where I did the training, they said, the majority of times when they see biases being introduced in decision making is when people use their system 1 thinking.
This is their intuitive, really fast, really automatic, really effortless, and based on emotions, rather than this notion of your system 2 thinking. Again, we have both of these: when we're slow, when we're deliberate, when we do our data crunching, when we're looking things from a neutral perspective. What we want to try and do is find that sweet spot where we have enough intuition and we have enough analysis. Let's call this seamless integration. This is where system 2 overrides the biases introduced by system 1. System 1 infuses our decision making with optimum effect. Hopefully, the process I'm going to show you now will highlight how that's possible.
First up, we need to find the mechanisms. How do we bring out all the objectives that are part of the decision making? In the talk previously, there were the principles that were mentioned, there was a follow-up question. How do you bring your product view in? How do you bring your UX? Whatever the various different stakeholders are within this. That's where I say you need to have representatives from all of these groups, and literally just talk and list, write them all down. Again, earlier I talked about the importance of writing these things down. When you have all of your stakeholders as part of this decision, again, you have to be really careful of what this group looked like, you don't want everyone, because otherwise that's going to be a really long process.
The key here is, listen to each other. Understand what are the judgments people are making. What are the assumptions, motivations, emotions that are coming into the decision? They should all write this down, so you will end up with a huge list. That's absolutely fine, because then you can start to review them. Are they the same? Are we having differences? You come up with this big list. Let's actually look at some statements in practice. This is based on an actual example where we had to decide where we best place, or what would the organizational structure be to do recommendation engines at the BBC. I think we had 70 items in that list. What does it say? Based on research, product personalization is key for younger audiences. Absolutely. Yes, we did have research. Question yourself. What's the demographic of that research portfolio that was used? Is it qualitative? Is it quantitative? This is what tends to refer to as availability bias, based on what information are we making this decision?
The next one is more about team health. Where does that come from? Is that based on the feeling across the whole team? Is it based on an individual? Go and question, where does this come from, and what does this mean as part of our decision-making process? I'll bring three and four up at the same time because they're quite interesting. This is what's referred to as overconfident, like, how do you know that under a centralized structure, your ability to reconfigure a system is easier? How does under a decentralized structure, your change delivery become faster? Is it really due to the structure or is it due to something else that is actually causing these things to be hindered?
I think it also shows, and I think this is the case in a lot of decision making, that you will have opposing views. There's opposing objectives. Some might affect each other, and it's really important to have all of them collectively. Then the final one is also a mixture of availability and overconfidence. You always heard these, like, we're going to save on operational cost. Really? Have you done your analysis? Have you done your simulations to really base these on facts.
How to Debias your Judgements/Statements
How do you debias these judgments, and what can you actually do? I think the important bit is here to always question, kind of like, where are these expectations coming from? Why are they being confirmed by everybody else? What data points do we have that no longer fit this hypothesis that we have? Search for signals that are incompatible with what you're trying to do here. It's essentially all about disconfirming your existing hypotheses. Cognitive repairs, is things like an action learning set, which is a framework that within 20 minutes, you get some really interesting different perspectives around a problem statement. You can list your commonality, your opposing view.
Actually, I learned this just recently, that Darwin used to have two notebooks, one where he wrote down all the data that would confirm his hypotheses, and one where he wrote down everything that might disconfirm it. Then he always reviewed these side by side, and needed to make sure that he checks off everything for it to be true in terms of what he was proposing. There are many others, you might have come across, 5 Whys? Write these down. We do this in root cause analysis. Get a red team in, get a team to actually disprove your hypothesis.
Their job is to show that your thing you're deciding, isn't going to be great. Get an outside view. Play something like devil's advocate. Or, is a pre-mortem analysis. Start the statement, in x months' time, it's clear the decision was a bad outcome, what has happened? Invite everyone to bring forward ideas of what and why it has happened. Really opens up to just, again, different thinking of what might have gone wrong and what can we present right now. There's a lot of formal aspects, like your decision trees, scenario analysis, simulations. They're quite resource intense, so you have to see what you've got available for you.
Let's say you've got your big list. You've got your 70 items, as I said, and you'd need to, I would recommend, always try and get this down to like 5 to 10 objectives, because that makes the process quite good. Here is a view of how we've done this in just a recent example. The final list we had was about 25 items. There were 10 decision makers. They came from 5 different disciplines, so 2 per discipline. We did a simple thing of, like, you've got 100 points, and you're only allowed to spend them in 5. Whenever you come to this kind of like, how are we going to do the scale? Decide this as quickly as possible, because people want to try and get, what about two and a half?
It's not just, stop. Because what's important is the outcome of the conversation that we have when you look at this. Just the top item already tells me what's going on here. Is the top item voted for by 16% of all of the total points available, but it's only half of the people in this group that find that important. Really interesting discussion point. What's going on here? Why are we misaligned, potentially?
Then I can tell you that this column was one discipline and this column was one discipline. What's going on here? The orange team, basically did not vote for the top two items that everybody else thought was really important, whereas the purple team spent 25% of their votes thinking of these are really critical items. You can see, if you go down to row 5, that's where the orange team all of a sudden thought, no, these are really important. Purple didn't at all.
This is where these things really help your conversations, really pull out, where do those biases come from? What's going on here? Remember that OK Corral, why are we seeing these things so differently? How can we make sure we can look at these in the same way? Then you can start again. Don't iterate forever and ever, because sometimes there are differences, and it's absolutely fine.
What this helps is to document where those differences are, and that's really important information. I'll just show you the four items that we came up with as part of this recommendations example. We wanted to enable the strategy and vision. We wanted to ensure that we can build shared capabilities. This platform thinking was really important. We also wanted to ensure that we represent team health, really important. You remember that one line item where people are really quite concerned about their roles? Again, they needed to be represented.
Ultimately, also our stakeholders. How do you get your editorial needs? Editorial is a key stake for us at the BBC. How do we get their interest represented? Again, it's a multitude of objectives that brings very different perspectives together. If this is a long process, it can go on for weeks, even if it goes on for months, continuously check back. Are those objectives still relevant? Because what can happen is new things come up. There might be a competitor product on the market, new objectives for the organization, always make sure that they're relevant. This is really important when you look at forecasting scenarios, where you constantly reforecast about your predictions.
When we have our objectives, the next step is to look at, what are all of the options that we want to consider? Remember this one right from the beginning, where we said, the more options you add the higher potential of your final decision to actually have a good outcome. What can you do? I think this is where really your system 1 thinking comes in. I invite you to be as ridiculous as possible, explore as many options as possible. Even if there are options that you anticipate are really highly unlikely, write them down, document why they are highly unlikely.
Because the corpus of information that you have when you follow this process makes it really easy to go into any meeting and then answer these questions. Why did you discard that one? It's because X, Y, and Z. Ok, cool. People then understand it. It's also really important to always put down the current situation. As I mentioned, there's this status quo bias. What is happening here? When you include it, you have a really clear overview of either why this decision is beneficial or potentially has a detrimental impact to your organization.
That's super important information to have to make sure you're not basing it on the status quo. Something called black swans. This is a theory to really look at this kind of like, close to moon crushes into the earth type scenarios, but really look into what are events that can potentially completely invalidate this decision? It's also really important to write that down. These, I appreciate they might not mean that much, but I just wanted to show you. We had about seven, I think, decisions in the fine line that we use to then compare against each other. Our data products, content discovery, that's the organizational areas within the organization. We then said, what are these differences? Are we centralizing here? Are we splitting things up? Those were the options that we're looking together.
Putting it All Together
Let's put it all together. I call these, four steps to effective decision making. The first one is, we've got to define and write down the decision that needs to be made. Find that group that you want to have part of this decision making. It's also important to just reflect quickly, to go and say, do we all, as part of this group, have the authority to actually then go enact the decision, or are we presenting this to somewhere else? When we did the recommendation example, we did it as a recommendation for somebody else to then take and implement. Second, go through those objectives. What is really critical to be considered as part of the decision? Explore your judgments, explore your biases. Try those scenarios, the 5 Whys, and agree that final list. Then, explore the options.
Anticipate as many options as possible, and do include that do nothing one, because that gives you the status quo, and how you can ensure the status quo doesn't become part of it. Then, finally, bring together this decision matrix. This is something I'll show you of how we now start to compare our options against our objectives. What does that look like? It is a spreadsheet. It could be any tool, really.The thing that this does, which I find quite amazing, is you ask everyone who's part of your decision to go in and score every option against the objective.
Again, I recommend, use a really simple scale of like, one, this objective or this option fully disrupts this particular objective, or, five, this objective fully supports that particular option. By comparing the objectives against the option, this way, do you not only quickly spot where your differences are, where do we have that potential misalignment, how we differently interpret why certain things might be beneficial or not beneficial.
It also provides, in my opinion, a holistic view that you otherwise get when people present you options, the chance that the first option they give you is the one that they really want. Then you go down the list, and by option four, whatever, that's really not the one that they want. You're already producing biases into those particular options. I also think with pros and cons lists, it's quite hard to compare, but again, that's just myself. Maybe I just like a really logical view. Remember my drivers, the perfect aspect really comes through here as well.
However, the transparency that this gives you to really understand is brilliant. Do people here run planning poker? It's the kind of similar idea. You say this takes whatever many story points, I say this takes, and it just allows you to have that conversation. Also, by then adding up all of the lovely scores, you can see which one is the most prominent or the best option that we want to take forward.
Let me show you an example. This is something that I actually did with some colleagues of mine, the three of us wanted to just go and understand how we would evaluate a couple of options that were discussed. It's really helpful. This is an exercise that literally just took 15, 20 minutes. What is quite interesting here is I can immediately spot those two areas, now they're exactly the same. That's a moment where you go and reflect to say, have we got group think going on here? Why are we all in the same way interpreting these particular options?
On the other hand, these ones, it basically shows that the top and the bottom score have more of a positive frame versus the one in the middle is more on the negative side. If you would neutralize these, it's exactly the same kind of storying, just one on the more positive end and one on the more negative one. What's going on? What do you see that we don't see potentially in those scenarios?
Then, finally, the ones where you see the biggest discrepancy, so why do we have a two-point difference here? Let's go and have a conversation about why that is and what this allows us to do. Then you can always rescore to see if that changed your different perspective. You can introduce some weighting, because, as you can see here on the bottom, hopefully you can see the point difference, actually, we're talking about 0.7 points, which is quite low. What we did here is we introduced some weighting to just see, are there some objectives that might bring out certain things in a different way? They did.
They didn't increase the difference that much, but it swapped the option 2 versus the option 1 scenario and order, then be able to see, ok, what is it that makes option 1 the preferred one in this example. I think weighting also allows you to just play with future scenarios. It's really quite a powerful way to just look at this, just make sure you don't end up gaming the whole thing.
Again, you can start calling this out, or somebody in your group can start calling this out. This was the final result that we came up with this recommendation example. I think here as well, you can see, and it tends to always be that there is two which are really quite similar, 28 to 29, one point difference is not that much in this overarching view right here. I should call out that if you have made your decision, we say it's option 3. That's when actually some of the really hard work starts, because there's a whole other thing that happens. How do I get the decision then actually through to the organization, when we talk about change management? As I mentioned in the beginning, it's really difficult. It requires the organization to really pull through.
Common Questions
There is a couple of common questions that I always get asked when I talk about this stuff. A, how do you decide who is part of that group? How do you greet that group in a sizable manner? Also, to prevent these previously mentioned biases, how do you ensure that you potentially can bring in someone from the outside. Or, can you actually have a neutral person to be part of the whole decision-making process? That's really quite powerful to keep you on track and start moving these things through. The other one is, so what constitutes a decision that should follow this? It might look like a very heavy process, so that people tend to immediately go and say, is this for the really consequential decisions? Is it for the irreversible one, your one door decisions?
Are these for the ones that require a high investment? I personally have used this approach on planning my holidays. Also, at work, as I mentioned, we try this or run this through in 30 minutes. It's absolutely possible. It's just a way to just go and say, are we all clear on the objectives, and are we all clear on the various different options that we want to consider? It's in particular this deep biasing, because that happens all the time. You sit in meetings all the time where people say certain things, and you just need to go and say, help me understand, where does this come from? It really shows you where certain information comes from.
Summary and Key Takeaways
I really quite like this definition of what a decision is, because I think it really highlights what's going on. It's a cocktail, a tradeoff of multiple judgments, conflicting objectives, different weights, preferences. They might be a matter of taste, maybe subjective, and risks. There are three things I'd love you to take away from this. Explore your personal drivers. Really look at yourself. Who are you as an individual? What is it that you bring to work on a daily basis? Where does it all come from? Reflect on that, on you, your team, your organization. Hopefully, I've shown you the importance of inquiry, really question, where do certain statements come from? How do you make sure that you understand where those biases are and what? Not how that only just applies to decision making, but generally everywhere. Also, to look at multiple objectives and multiple options that are part of any decision-making process.
See more presentations with transcripts
