The Real Challenge Business Leaders Can’t Seem To Solve: Making The Right Decisions Consistently

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Have you ever questioned or regretted a business decision you’ve made over the past year?

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one, I found in a study by PR Newswire and Oracle published last year that says that:

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“85% of business leaders have suffered from decision distress – regretting, feeling guilty about, or questioning a decision they made in the past year.”

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However, what’s really concerning is the impact that decision-making is having on our behaviours and how it impacts organisations. Beyond the financial repercussions or the consequences for our customers and colleagues, the impact on our stress level and ability to make future decisions is also at stake.

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Why do we continue making decisions with such a low level of confidence?

Decision-making is a skill, so why aren’t we trying to get better at it?

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?While I don’t claim to have all the answers (I’m still searching for that crystal ball), over the last decade helping ?business leaders making the right decisions, we’ve come up with ways to increase our confidence and continue to improve our ability to make better-decisions.

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In this article I will share more insights from the 14,000 employee study discussed above.

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I will also guide you on how to achieve greater clarity ahead of your next business decision.

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Understanding the Low Confidence in Decision-Making

What are the mains reasons for making poor decisions:

It appears that business leaders today are expected to make countless decisions per day, every day, steering the business faster and faster to satisfy the shareholders desire for growth.

One consequence is that we can’t spend enough the time searching existing data to support our decisions, especially when we get lost in the extensive amount of data available or can’t trust its source.

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Thus we select 2 or 3 metrics to add to our upcoming presentation to the board.

Those metrics will support the story we have come up with, not the other way around, as we follow our strong gut feeling and past experiences that have led us where we are today.

We hope during the presentation that no one will use the little time available to challenge the reasoning behind all of it, after all, we can’t delay that decision, we have 5 more to make today and it’s already 3pm!

Great! Meeting done, decision made, moving on to the next one!

It’s fine, no one will measure the impact of our decisions anyway!

(true story!)

Consequences For Businesses And Employees

There are obvious consequences on the business, with potentially severe financial losses, or inevitable impact on customer and employee satisfaction.

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On an individual level, our inability to make the right decision can affect our well-being: increased stress, disrupted ?sleep, drained energy and decrease in productivity, among other issues.

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"Data has become such a stressing factor that 29% of business leaders now solely rely on gut feelings."

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With more datapoints coming our way, if we continue in this direction, we’re in for a though ride!

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Ensuring Reliable Customer Insights and Performance Metrics is Critical

?"93 percent believe having the right type of decision intelligence can make or break the success of an organization."

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If you can’t trust the data, then there is no need for any feedback tool or fancy dashboards.

Leaders will simply not use them.

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This is why all along our work with decision-makers we focus on reliability:

• When analysing customer’s insights, we rely on sentiment analysis and AI to directly assess the source of feedback, which tends to be mostly qualitative. This approach removes shortcuts made by other types of tools that could create biases and open for interpretation.
• For business KPIs and performance metrics, we dedicate time with specialists to find out each metric’s reliability, ensuring we understand and share about potential limitations before incorporating them into our analyses. In this way, we remove most interpretations or changes that could be due to the means of measuring more than a real change in customer’s behaviours.

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Pursuing A Customer-led And Data-centric Decision-making Process

I remain hopeful that collectively we can turn the tide and get better at making decisions.

I have seen many times with my clients how using our decision intelligence has brought some relief in the teams and steered investments into the right direction.

The usage of customer-led and performance-based data and insights to support our decision-making goes hand in hand to give us a clearer picture, removing biases that can sometimes occur when using only one method.

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Customer-led decision making:

When I started with a client 5 years ago, I learned of their plan to invest a significant amount of money in reducing the delivery lead-time, believed to be their e-commerce customers’ primary pain-point.

However, our new customer feedback tool, powered by AI, quickly revealed this assumption to be misguided, primarily based on intuition and biased data. (looking at support data and contact reasons, you mostly can see complaints, which creates an important bias when looking at the overall experience provided).

To the leaders’ surprise, the speed of delivery was highly regarded by customers, who both judged the delivery speed as important and satisfactory, so investing large sums of money would only have generated a marginal impact.

Instead the investment was used to counter a new pain-point uncovered by the feedback tool, with a much higher impact on profitability and customer satisfaction.

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Performance-driven decision-making:

Sometimes relying solely on customer feedback can introduce its own set of biases.

For instance, feedback on the payment process only comes from successful transactions.

We get very little complaints about the payment process, which is normal, after all, because those are the customers who succeeded in paying.

The ones who had issues left the process, didn’t purchase, hence didn’t receive a survey.

A comprehensive analysis of the sales funnel revealed a substantial problem, with only 70% of potential transactions being completed.

Another example to show that multiple sources of data and a thorough understanding of potential biases is key to finding the right information to use.

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Looking Ahead: Enhancing Your Decision-Making Process

Imagine how great it would be if, for your next business decision, you could use reliable customer’s insights and trustworthy business metrics to support that decision?

How would it impact your confidence, your stress-level and your ability to share with everyone around you the reasons for making those decisions?

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We can help you with making decisions with more confidence!

I invite you to take a discovery call with me so I can tell you more about the process and how we can help you specifically.

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Each decision counts, so let’s start today making better decisions!