Finding the decision-making sweet spot: Gather the data, then act without delay

The purpose of?Monday’s Leadership Learnings Series?is to share weekly doses of encouragement and learnings from my own experience and the experiences of the most inspiring and integral leaders I know.

Bi-monthly, on Mondays for the next six months, I plan to share leadership learning and reflections with this community. I’d love to generate a bit of a conversation on what is needed most from us as leaders, as we enter what the world is predicting to be a rough winter. I hope that we can create a little community so that we can all pull from each other’s strengths and have the courage to seize the opportunities that this next phase of transformation in the world will bring.?

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Finding the decision-making sweet spot: Gather the data, then act without delay

As in most things in life, when it comes to making impactful decisions, timing is key. Move too quickly, and you risk making an ill-informed and costly choice, wait too long and you risk playing catch-up. Dithering can also prove costly. As decision-making has my attention at the moment I've decided to unpack it here.

A few years ago, a senior leader and good friend of mine stressed to me the importance of collecting high-quality, accurate data to make well-informed decisions. As a leader, she felt it was crucial that the people in possession of the insights (closest to the action) were at the decision-making table. Your role as a leader is not just to be democratic about involving people, it is critical to involve the right people at the right time, to make an informed decision, with speed she stressed.

She’s right of course that high-quality data is important. And, acting within the window of opportunity– or the timing of that decision – is the other half of the decision-making equation.?From my experience, I hold this to be true: for organizations to thrive strategically, operationally, and culturally, we need to learn how to make the best decisions, and with relative speed. Decision-making is the lifeblood of any organization.?

In my quest to understand more about timely decision-making, I was introduced by Dan Toma to a framework called Kissinger’s cross.

The first step is to align your leadership team around a strategic choice or transformative action by considering:

• Information (accuracy) aspect: Do we have enough (and accurate) information to act now?
• Time aspect: Has our window of opportunity closed?

If we plot it on a time scale, the more time you take to collect quality information the more certain you will be of the decision. However, as time goes on and our information about the opportunity increase, our ability to seize the opportunity decreases. There is a point where the two graphs meet and if you wait longer, you will find you are in a situation with high certainty but limited opportunity to act to seize it. This is the point in business for example, where the market size, growth rate, competitive situation, or possibility to make an impact to reverse damage (global warming) are no longer favorable; you have missed the window of opportunity, and are playing catch up.

As you go through your decision-making processes, I found starting with the below guiding questions worth reflecting on:

• Who has the highest quality information and how can we access it?
• Have we agreed what is the minimal level of certainty we need to take the next action?
• Have we considered our time vis-à-vis our window of opportunity?
• What is a timeline beyond which my freedom to act closes (window of opportunity)
• What is the cost of acting now?
• What is the cost of not acting now?

Although important, the answer to the above questions are only one part of the decision-making process. To act deliberately we as leaders need to be informed about all the other dimensions of the desired option – we must then more fully evaluate the most important aspects such as - the internal capabilities of our organizations as well as the external environment.

Here are the top elements to look at when seeking to drive alignment on a leadership team so that we can take decisive action:?

• Financial impact: Can we afford the investment required to pursue this strategic option?
• Capability impact: Do we have what it takes to follow/implement this option? If not, can we build or buy time and still remain within the window of opportunity?
• External timing: Is there evidence that the market is heading in this direction?
• Internal politics: Can we rally support inside our company to fully implement this strategic option?
• External ecosystem support: Do we have the critical players in our external ecosystem to help us take off?
• Analog insights: Who else (from outside or inside) has tried this and who can we learn from?
• Upside: What is the best-case scenario of the upside of this option if it gets executed perfectly?
• Opportunity Cost: If we make this decision what is the worst-case scenario?
• Breakthrough requirements: What do we need to put in place in order to enable this breakthrough? What is in place that needs to be removed because it is a serious barrier to enabling this breakthrough?

Making quality decisions and taking decisive collective action is never easy or straightforward, but as leaders, we need to increase this capability in everyone, as it is the lifeblood of any organization. If your team is not making decisions, they are not taking action, and action is the key to organizational growth and learning.

I hope you will find the Kissinger Cross approach as useful as I have and that it might help you to transform your team’s best intentions into decisions and actions in a timely manner.

I’d love to hear what you have identified as the main accelerators or barriers to quality and timely decision-making within your organization.

Monday's Leadership Learning quote:

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. - Theodore Roosevelt

Acknowledgment to Dan Toma for his thought partnership and musing on this one.