Sometimes you just have to make a call
“Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.”
The right decisions can make or break companies.
The worst thing you can do is be indecisive, and block the progress of your organization in competitive environments. A close tie for worst thing is to constantly thrash your organization with bad or ambiguous decisions.
No one teaches you “decision making”. There are reasons for this. Decision making does not have a blueprint, and is often contextual to a specific set of expertise or experience. Decision making is best made with mental models and frameworks which simplify complexity, and which themselves are toolboxes that individuals build over time.
So when faced with urgent decisions that don’t have a clear answer and need more information, what can you do?
First, realize that not all decisions are the same.
Trivial decisions should be made promptly
High impact decisions should take more time
If you think you are taking too long, or find yourself having circular discussions with others over trivial decisions, realize you are massively wasting time. With trivial decisions, assuming you have some amount of expertise in the subject area, speed is more important than accuracy. Your educated guess will be right more often than not.
But you can improve the accuracy of even these quick decisions. And it’s the same process that can be used to improve your ability to make high impact decisions. Ready?
Think back to a few times you made trivial or high impact decisions. Which ones worked out? Which ones didn’t? Why or why not? Did you get lucky with some that worked out? Unlucky with ones that didn’t?
Did you fix one problem and create several others? How do you avoid that in the future?
At times where you struggled to make a decision, what were you missing? If it was knowledge, where can you acquire more of that knowledge? If it was a bad guess, what conclusions made you arrive at that guess?
Seek advice from others you respect, without being defensive of criticism. Otherwise, you are just validation seeking, which is also a waste of time. Observe others you respect when they make decisions. What were the mental models they used to get there?
By retroactively analyzing your decisions and their outcomes, and constantly learning, you will start to build your own toolbox of mental models and frameworks. And gradually over time, you will find yourself taking less time to make decisions without sacrificing accuracy, as you begin to instinctively recall and deploy your constantly growing frameworks.
Some examples of trivial decisions:
Delegating low level tasks to others
Choosing between high, medium, or low priority for a bug
What to order for lunch
Some examples of high impact decisions
Choosing the priorities for your big bets
Hiring people
Refactoring an old system that is struggling to keep up with needs vs keep iterating on what you have
Did you think a week before giving up reporting of KPIs to a direct report? What happens if you immediately gave it up with a 30 minute crash course, and let them figure it out? How did you benefit? How did they benefit?
Did you have three meetings to discuss if you should fix a bug this week, or next week? What happens if decided next week, and someone wanted you to fix it this week? Also, why did you pick next week?
Did you find yourself scrolling for 15 minutes on Doordash at lunchtime? What is wrong with you?
What about high impact decisions?
How did you go about stack ranking your big bets? These have massive impacts on the potential success or failure of your entire company. Fermi exercises are a good start, thinking about revenue or customer impact, identifying what doesn’t get built until later in the year, understanding the risks of building something (or not building something). Do this enough times, retroactively examine your decisions, and ask for (and learn from) trusted opinions, and you will find yourself taking less and less time on each consideration point. You will also find that you keep increasing the consideration points in your toolbox as you grow your framework.
Did you snap hire someone who was middling because you were desperate? Bringing middling people on will demoralize your best talent, and will also drag them into compensating for others, wasting their precious time. This will have long lasting impact on your company, and may cause your best people to flee.
Did you commit all your engineers to refactor an aging system, at the cost of building nothing else for six months? What did you gain from that? 2x development speed? 5x less issues? Did you consider these before you made that decision? How much capital did you spend, and what was the ROI? Are you six months behind your competitors now?
There are many more examples, mental models, and exercises to examine and learn from. But being naturally inquisitive, analytical, and willing to commit time for self-improvement, will certainly lead to a path to your own personal PHD in decision making.