"Everything I learned about making impossible decisions during the first two years of my presidency culminated in one of the toughest choices I had to make: whether to authorize the raid to take out Osama bin Laden. It was an operation rife with uncertainty and risk."
- Barak Obama
I recently came across a great article written by Barak Obama where he described how he made tough decisions in office. Leaders can face some incredibly hairy decisions in business, but if anyone is going to face complex, intractable, difficult decisions with no right answer, it is probably a world leader.
Lean on a process. One of the things Obama says is that rather than get caught up in the feeling that he could never find the perfect solution when there wasn't one, he would lean on a sound thinking and decision-making process to be sure he had made the best decision he could - and happily for me, the process he describes bears many similarities with the one I use in courses and coaching.
A great question I use in leadership and executive coaching is "What would it take for you to feel like you had made the best decision possible, even if it turned out to be the wrong decision?" This question gets people thinking about what information they need, what listening they need to do, and what principles are guiding their thinking. Get those right, and it can free you from a lot of worry and provide a basis for confidence in decision-making. Obama describes it as being "liberating and humbling" to lean on a process. Leaning on a process is a bit like following a training programme to complete a race. You don't prepare only by thinking about how to put in your best performance on the day, you create a training plan that you know will get you there, then you follow it. Although there are no guarantees and lots of things that could go wrong, you trust that if you do the training, you've given yourself the best chance of performing on race day. Jim Collins, in his book "How the Mighty Fall", outlines five reasons that his research uncovered for why companies fail. One of them is the 'undisciplined pursuit of more', which he describes as making strategic moves without properly thinking through whether they are the best decision for the company's long term success. There are lots of reasons leaders do this, but all of them could be overcome by the disciplined application of a sound thinking and decision-making process.
Here's the rest of Obama's quote:
"So, I ran a tight process. I trusted my team. I listened to every voice in the room. I gave myself space to think. And then I made a decision that reflected my own personal sense of what was right. While I couldn’t guarantee the outcome, I was confident in making the decision."
- Barak Obama
He uses that word confidence, which I think is key. We can't always have confidence in what is going to happen as a result of our decisions, but we can have confidence in the process we use to make them. Not having (and using) a sound thinking and deciding process leaves us open to deciding based on flimsy data, poorly defined principles, and human biases. Scary stuff.
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Photo credit: @libraryofcongress on Unsplash
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