Les McKeown's Predictable Success Blog

  • April 24, 2022
  • minute read

How to Make Great Decisions 

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A version of this article first appeared in Inc.com

Listen to Les McKeown read this blog post:

Success in all areas of life comes down to just one thing – making the right decisions.

Think about it: Making decisions is what you do all day, every day. Do I hire this person or not? What’s the right pricing structure for this product? Should I choose this supplier or that one?

These and a thousand other decisions, from the seemingly mundane to the monumental, are the very fabric of your daily life as a leader (actually, for all of us, whether we think of ourselves as leaders or not).

Get the majority of those decisions right, and you win. Get the majority (or even a crucial minority) of them wrong, and you lose.

So important is effective decision-making that you would think by now we would have developed a standardized way of making leadership decisions

And yet, after almost two centuries of what we might view as the modern era of organizational design, we don’t even share a common vocabulary around the decision-making process.

That’s not to say there isn’t an enormous body of literature on the topic – there are in fact, as you may have noticed, so many decision-making books, classes, courses and models that making a decision about how to make decisions is, well, hard to do.

So, in the spirit of not adding to that voluminous body of work, let me be succinct and share with you the simple subliminal pattern which every highly effective leader uses to make high-quality decisions:

1. Investigation

Effective decision-making is a relatively simple three-part process, and Investigation is the first part (think of it as the backswing of a golf or tennis stroke – we’ll see the other two parts shortly).

Investigation means making this simple commitment:  

We will take time to identify and understand the underlying data we need to make an effective decision.

What this means in practice will vary of course: we might uncover all we need to know about a simple issue in 90 seconds or less by simply asking one or two questions, whereas gathering the information needed to decide about opening a new plant or launching a new product might be a major months-long project involving multiple teams of people. 

Of course, the secret is in getting the balance right: most of us are either too cavalier – rushing into a decision without really taking the time to gather and understand all the underlying information; or too risk-averse – edging toward ‘paralysis by analysis’ and spend way too much time gathering and analyzing every last microbe of data.

2. Interpretation

If investigation is like the backswing, the second part, interpretation, is the equivalent of the club hitting the ball: its the point of impact, where we take the information we gathered and analyzed in part one and use it – interpret it, if you will – to make an actual decision.

Again, this step will vary from decision to decision – a water-cooler discussion about whether or not someone can have next Friday off may move seamlessly through investigation (“Is there anyone in that day who can cover for you?”) to decision (“OK, then, sure”) in a nanosecond; whereas interpreting all the information gathered to back up that new plant decision might take weeks or months.

Again, the key is in getting the balance right.

Great leaders match the interpretation time to the size of the issue, whereas micromanagers grind over every decision, large or small, and cavalier leaders get bored easily and too often press for quick decisions.

3. Implementation

Finally the third – and co-equally important part, the follow-through: Implementation.

As many of us experience regularly with New Year’s Resolutions, making a great decision isn’t enough – you have to actually implement it.

This may seem a no-brainer, but think about it: how many perfectly good decisions or initiatives have you seen made in the last year, but not followed through on properly?

Except in the smallest of organizations (where there is nowhere to hide and therefore transparency and accountability is inherently high), a frighteningly large percentage of otherwise excellent decisions are never fully implemented, usually because of a lack of Ownership & Self-Accountability as detailed in our previous two posts here and here).

There’s no mystery to this three-part decision-making process – as you can see, it’s a simple, natural rhythm we all subliminally work through when we’re faced with any decision, large or small.

The trick is in recognizing which of the three we’re least good at, and disciplining ourselves to work harder at those areas.

(I have a tendency to get bored with the implementation step, for example, and I need to force myself to build accountability steps into the implementation of any major decisions I take).

What about you - What of these three steps in the decision making process do you need to work on most?

Let Me Know In The Comments Below!

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  1. Hey – great to see you here!

    What about you – What of these three steps in the decision making process do you need to work on most? Let me know in the comments below!

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