How to Make Good Decisions in any Context

Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post:

An inescapable point we emphasize over and over again in building Predictable Success is that the foundation of lasting, profitable organizational growth is the ability to make and implement consistently sound decisions.

And while having an overall framework for making good decisions (the topic of our previous post) Is clearly Important, the context within which you're making the decision Is equally so.

As any leader discovers early on, making an effective decision about a long-term strategy while at a strategic retreat , for example, is an entirely different process from making an effective triage decision in the midst of a roaring, white-hot emergency.

As a result, an otherwise-perfectly-good decision made in one context can fail, seemingly inexplicably, in another.

"The foundation of lasting, profitable organizational growth is the ability to make consistently sound decisions." - Les McKeown, Founder and CEO, Predictable Success

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Here’s a framework you can use to change that:

Assuming you have good data to hand, all decision-making is a playoff between three things:

How fast you need or want to make the decision,
How transparent you want the process to be to others, and
How collaborative you want the decision-making process to be.

Ideally, all three would be active, like this:

The Ideal Decision Making Triangle

In reality, rarely can all three be in play, as shown above. Usually, creating a high-quality decision involves compromising on, or ditching altogether, one of the three legs.

For example, making highly effective decisions about long-term strategy requires that we be both collaborative and transparent, but almost always, such decisions arrive slowly:

Strategic decision-making

Contrast that with what needs to happen when faced with a complex short-term problem (think Apollo 13 – and if you haven’t seen it, watch the movie – it’s a great lesson in how to make great decisions under pressure).

In this case, we need to be collaborative (every good idea needs to be heard), and we need to be fast. Transparency – communicating in detail as we go through the decision-making process – will only slow us up and must wait until after we’ve fixed the issue:

Problem-solving decision-making

The third option is where a leader needs to take a decision based on clear ethical or moral grounds – think of the PR decisions around the BP oil spill back in 2010 (not the operational decisions around fixing the spill – those fall into the second group above), or Nike's commitment to supply chain reform.

Here, although ‘collaboration’ may be very necessary when it comes to execution, it is not only unnecessary in the decision stage (the moral principles involved are usually quite clear enough), invoking it is in fact often a fudge, and will make the resulting decision seem contrived and weaselly. We do need, however, to be both transparent and fast: