Decision Journey
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Joseph Campbell, Hero With 1000 Faces
To create an organization that makes high quality decisions, you first need to understand the larger dynamics that govern decision making and decision quality. There are many, but the ones we’ll focus on here are:
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A decision is only as good as the weakest link.
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How you frame decisions matters.
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You can’t know everything beforehand.
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Organizational decision making is a balancing act.
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It’s not a decision until you commit.
Let’s look at each of these themes in the context of one of the great case studies in organizational decision quality of the last hundred years: the journey of Ernest Shackleton and his crew to the Antarctic aboard The Endurance.
The Endurance
If you want to read a terrific story about leadership and decision making, read “Endurance,” Alfred Lansing’s outstanding tale of Ernest Shackleton’s amazing voyage to the South Pole.
Ernest Shackleton was a turn-of-the-last century British Explorer. Like so many others of his kind, he was audacious, self-reliant, romantic, and never doubted for a moment that if he could imagine it, he could make it happen—just like many of the leaders and executives I know.
A man of limited means and huge ambition, Shackleton meant to be the first man to cross the Antarctic continent by dog sled. Without recounting the entire tale here, here are highlights of some of the critical decisions Shackleton and others made along the way.
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He bought a boat that someone else had commissioned for a different expedition. Why? He got a great deal and he was strapped for funds. It was slab-sided, built like a strong box, and perfectly fitted for bashing around in loose pack ice. As it turns out, he should have bought something with a rounded, bowl-shaped hull so that if the boat got caught in the ice—which it did—it would pop up onto the floe instead of becoming locked in a death grip which is what happened.
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The Endurance left the final jumping off point, South Georgia Island, for the Antarctic at a time when the local whalers couldn’t remember worse polar ice conditions. Shackleton made the decision to push on. It turns out the locals were right . . . and then the ice got worse still.
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Near Vahsel Bay, Endurance got caught in a really nasty gale while attempting to navigate along the edge of an ice pack. As the weather moderated, Shackleton pointed the ship between two ice floes towards what looked like open water and their ultimate destination, the Weddell Sea. What seemed like a routine decision sealed the expedition’s fate. Hours later, the ice closed around the Endurance. The ship never came unstuck and was ultimately crushed and dragged under by the ice eleven months later.
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Having sat waiting, watching, and hoping for those eleven months, Shackleton and crew then spent the next five months pushing and pulling three boats across the ice in an attempt to reach open water and ultimately South Georgia Island.
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Finally, as the ice they had been on for sixteen months broke up beneath them, the crew mounted a desperate journey across one of the most harrowing stretches of water in the world. Braving gale force winds and treacherous seas, the crew ultimately found its way to Elephant Island—870 miles from South Georgia Island and help.
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Shackleton and two crewmen struck out in a 22 foot long boat towards South Georgia Island, leaving the rest to wait and do whatever it took to survive. Shackleton and his two mates landed in the wrong place and determined that the best way to proceed was on foot. The final hike to the Stromness Whaling Station included jumping off a 25 foot water fall into freezing water.
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It took another three months before Shackleton was finally able to return by boat to Elephant Island for the rest of the crew. All of them were rescued, two years to the day after they had sailed from England.
And those were just some of the big decisions. Mixed in between were all the hundreds and thousands of other decisions Shackleton and his leadership group made to deal with a mind boggling range of issues, even the smallest of which they knew could have immense consequences to the health and survival of the crew.
The decisions you make about deploying resources against strategic accounts aren’t nearly this exciting or as consequential. Still, there are lessons to be learned from the tale of the Endurance that any Strategic Account Executive can use.
A Decision Is Only As Good As the Weakest Link
There are many ways to break down a decision. You may have your own framework, but the one we like is displayed in Figure 1.
The first three Decision Points—frame, people, and process—comprise your decision declaration. They describe what you’re going to work on and how you’re going to work on it. The second three—alternatives, values, and information—point to what you work with to bring your decision to a final choice you can act on.
You can do any five really well and still wind up with a low-quality decision if you do the sixth one poorly.
To pick an example from our story, it turns out that Shackleton followed no discernable method or procedure in how he chose his crew. He picked his officers because he’d worked with them before—probably a good thing. As for the rest of the crew, he mostly just went with his gut. Many had never served on a ship. If this group had come unraveled, most or all of them would have perished on the ice. The fact that they didn’t doesn’t make Shackleton’s hiring decision process a good one.
Many leaders and managers make decisions just like Shackleton chose his crew. Ignorance, habit, lack of confidence in the people around them, or the seeming crush of time and events can all lead to snap decisions. Often they work, sometimes they don’t.
Your decision making process is only as good as the weakest link. If you want to make consistently high quality decisions, you need to “divide and conquer”: break the decision down and work it a piece at a time. Standardize your critical decision making on a single model like the one I’ve hinted at here. Put in place the training and tools necessary to create fluency with your people with the model and processes of declaring and working a decision. Weave decision quality into all your management and coaching dialogs so that your people come to understand the importance you place on high quality decision making.
How You Frame Decisions Matters
While each of the six Decision Points is important, framing the decision properly seems to matter the most. If you think about it, it’s just not possible to make a good decision, no matter how well you work at it, if you’re working on the wrong problem.
Consider Shackleton’s purchase of The Endurance. Lansing reports that by every measure, Endurance was an exquisite craft. The problem was it was the wrong kind of boat for poking around Antarctica.
There are many decision frames that would have led to the purchase of Endurance for this expedition. Any of the following would have done it.
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We need a boat that’s not too big, not too small, but just right given the size of the expedition and all the stuff we have to haul with us.
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We need a really strong boat.
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We need a boat that won’t bob like a cork in the open seas.
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We’re really strapped for funds. We need a good boat for cheap.
As it turns out, Shackleton was short on funds so the decision frame was “buy a really strong boat for cheap.” The Endurance was available because the man who ordered it for a different expedition had a falling out with his partner. So he sold it o Shackleton for a loss.
A different decision frame might have led to a different decision based on the reasonable assumption that the boat might become trapped in the ice. Remember, The Endurance was slab sided and they really needed something with a rounder profile. For example, consider these frames:
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We need a boat that will stand the highest chance of surviving the conditions we’ll probably face over the course of an entire year or more sailing near the South Pole.
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We need a boat that won’t get crushed when/if we get caught in the ice.
Better framing would have changed everything. That’s not to say that the journey would have otherwise gone off without a hitch. There would have been other challenges, but probably not the ones detailed in the story. But one thing is certain: Shackleton’s decision frame led him to buy The Endurance, and the rest is history.
As a leader or manager, make sure you focus yourself and your people on doing what it takes to properly frame decisions. As you begin the journey to install a better decision framework in your organization, you should have a hand in declaring or inspecting every significant decision frame. Later, as people become more confident and fluent, you can turn them loose to do their own framing, with you standing by as coach and occasional gadfly.
You Can’t Know Everything Beforehand
If only Shackleton had known he was going to get stuck in the ice, he might have bought a different boat. Or staid at South Georgia Island. Or taken another route. Or not gone at all. Or, or, or . . .
Later, when Shackleton determined to sail from Elephant Island to South Georgia to find help, all he really knew is that he and his two mates would have to cross more than 800 miles of open Antarctic waters in a boat that was 22 feet long and about six feet wide; barely bigger than a Chevrolet Suburban. He could also reasonably be sure that the weather would be bad and that there would be ice.
Given more time and more information, he might have been able to narrow the uncertainty he was facing about currents, tides, weather, and ice. In this particular case, he had neither time or access to more information, and even if he did, he still had to act. He still had to decide. So he picked the people he thought best suited to the rigors that lay ahead, gathered up the food and gear he thought he needed and that he thought the others could spare, and off they went.
The decisions you face as a leader or manager aren’t much different. Like Shakleton, you can’t know everything before you make a decision, and even if you could, the cost and time involved in obtaining all available information and 100% certainty usually generates at least two outcomes:
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The opportunity or problem requiring the decision would have passed.
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The advantage gained by making the decision would have been mitigated or eliminated by the cost of obtaining 100% information and 100% certainty.
Identifying, understanding, talking about, and ultimately quantifying uncertainty are all part of good decision making. Help your people find and understand risk. In doing that, pay particular attention to identifying the “critical uncertainty,” the big unknown on which the decision really hangs. Seek information to take the mystery out of what is otherwise unknowable. Test your alternatives by looking for information that disproves and disconfirms what you think you want to do. Use your new insights to reframe the decision, identify alternatives, and hone your values so that you can with confidence choose a path, even though you don’t know for sure the outcome.
Organizational Decision Making is a Balancing Act
Organizational decision making is fraught with paradox: seemingly irreconcilable polarities that demand that the leader make conscious trade-offs to balance conflicting needs within the decision process itself, and then again when it comes time to working a decision to conclusion. Of the many I see with my clients, these four seem to summarize the conflicts. I call these the “Four Decision Paradoxes.”
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Inclusion vs. Efficiency
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Empowerment vs. Control
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Rules vs. Method
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Head vs. Heart
For example, how much “inclusiveness” is enough? You could eliminate the fuss and muss of dialog and debate and simply make all the decisions yourself . . . and some leaders and managers do. This also limits the number of decisions that get made, not to mention the diversity of point of view and buy-in that might come from involving a wider group of people.
Conversely, you could seek to involve your colleagues and subordinates in most or even all the decisions you make. That creates the possibility of rich debate and dialog but limits the number of decisions that might be made as everything gets bashed around by everyone.
Or consider empowerment vs. control. Here, the issue is deciding how much of what decisions you keep, and what parts you have others do.
At the empowerment end, you authorize a person or people to work the decision (perhaps even to declare the decision) within certain broad parameters. In effect, you’re saying, “you make this decision as if you were me.” This is a viable choice when you have a functioning decision framework and process.
At the control end of the spectrum, you distribute some or none of the decision declaration, and some part of the working. You’re saying, “Within this frame, and with these rules and values, you choose what to do.”
These two paradoxes hint at a third: the method by which you want to move through the decision process. There are times and places when the proper method of work is to follow rules of thumb and rely on trusty short cuts to get to a choice and begin implementing. Shackleton clearly relied on this type of decision making once out on the ice. It is often the right choice if you have either the need to move quickly.
At the other extreme, you lay out a methodical, multi-step process for working a problem. This usually takes the form of a business case. The intent is to think through and quantify every reasonable alternative and potential risk with an eye towards minimizing the need to make adjustments once implementation has begun.
Finally, there is the question of how to balance head and heart; logic and instinct. Should you make a decision based solely on the numbers—on expected financial return for example—or should you weigh in with gut, intuition, and seat of the pants? This dichotomy tends to move in concert with the aim/fire, fire/aim paradox, but also hints at issues of creativity and divergent thinking as well.
The ends of these paradoxes are mutually exclusive: you can’t be extremely inclusive and still be extremely efficient, for example. One isn’t necessarily better than another. They are validated by different values. One extreme might be perfect in one instance and poorly suited to another.
It’s Not a Decision Until You Commit
A decision is an irrevocable allocation of resource.
Irrevocable: Once you decide, you don’t undecided or re-litigate unless you have new information that changes the frame, the values, or the alternatives.
Allocation of resource: A decision isn’t an intention, it’s thought into action, action which requires money, energy, and/or effort—resource—to bring it about.
Between “intent” and an “irrevocable allocation of resource” lies a gulf that many people and many decisions never cross. Whatever else you might say about Shackleton, you can’t fault him for his ability to make one commitment after another. He was a man who understood how to turn intention into attention and then action.
For example, it’s one thing to talk about crossing the Antarctic by dog sled. It’s another to raise a pot full of money, hire a crew, and buy a boat. It’s another still to set sail from South Georgia Island towards the South Pole. And it’s a whole other kind of commitment to get in a 22 foot boat to sail across 870 miles of freezing ocean knowing that if you fail, the rest of your crew will probably die. Those are big decisions because those are big commitments.
It constantly amazes me how many “decisions” never make it past well debated intent. I’ve worked with a lot of people in a lot of organizations, and it’s hard to count the number of times I’ve heard things like:
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We’re terrible implementers around here.
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A decision will get made one day, and unmade the next.
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We need to learn how to make decisions that don’t get re-litigated.
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There are definitely people around here who feel like they can show up at the last minute and change everything.
Debate can be a good, healthy, and necessary part of making high quality decisions. But at some point, if it is to be a decision, there needs to be action which means some resource gets allocated.
Good leaders and managers make those kinds of decisions—the kind that get acted on. Great leaders and managers foster organizational decision making. They create dynamics and dialogs that cause intention to become attention and then action that is supported and understood. They help the people around them make things happen.
If you know going in that there are no resources, money, or bandwidth available to implement, then cut the charade and terminate the decision process. That’s the best decision you can make in that case.
Having worked a decision to a choice, lock it down, and do what it takes to get it implemented. Harvest the learning, and then move to the next decision. It seems simple, yet most organizations, by the admission of the people running them, do a poor job of turning intention into action. All it takes is attention. Yours. Make “irrevocable allocation of resource” your top priority.
Summary
A decision is only as good as the weakest link. If you want to make consistently high quality decisions, you need to “divide and conquer”: break the decision down and work it a piece at a time.
How you frame decisions matters. As a leader or manager, make sure you focus yourself and your people on doing what it takes to properly frame decisions.
You can’t know everything beforehand. Identifying, understanding, talking about, and ultimately quantifying uncertainty are all part of good decision making. Pay particular attention to identifying the “critical uncertainty,” the big unknown on which the decision really hangs.
Organizational decision making is a balancing act. Create rules around the four paradoxes for the different types of decisions people in your organization regularly make.
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Inclusion vs. Efficiency
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Empowerment vs. Control
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Rules vs. Method
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Head vs. Heart
It’s not a decision until you commit. Having worked a decision to a choice, lock it down, and do what it takes to get it implemented. Harvest the learning, and then move to the next decision. Make “irrevocable allocation of resource” your top priority.
You can read more about decision making and innovation at www.decision-quality.com. You can also download an even longer version of this paper at that site.
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Copyright © 2003
Kevin Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06