Zen of Ten: 10 Tips for Better Decision-Making

The key to being a great leader (at any level, personal or professional) is being decisive.

Actually, I’ll go further — I think being decisive is the key to success, happiness and a more productive and fulfilling life.

There, I said it (I know, I sound a tad like a self-help therapist, but stay with me for a moment).

1. Force Inflection Points. Get comfortable making decisions by making more of them, more often. Get in the habit of being decisive by creating more inflection points — moments that force you to make a call.

2. Create a Framework. All good decision-making is grounded in some heuristic. Be sure to have a framework for problem-solving and analyzing the opportunities your decision will create.

3. Sleep on It. No important decision, despite what the breathless urgency of those around you might suggest, couldn’t wait until morning. You’ll be amazed at how giving your decision a little room to breathe will yield clarity. Give your mind time to mull it over, and others a chance to consider the options.

4. Separate the Rightness of The Decision, From The Consequences of That Decision. It’s too easy to scenario-plan yourself to death, and to allow the weight of the consequences to overwhelm, and thus stymie, your decision. Separate the two and have faith in the rightness of your decision.

5. Think Aloud. You’d be amazed at how productive verbalizing a decision can be, before it’s made. And don’t overthink with whom you discuss it — an Uber driver, your significant other, a best friend, more. A listening ear can be enormously useful, especially when it’s a non-critical ear. And hearing yourself say what’s on your mind will often result in the right answer.

6. Trust Your Intuition. Malcolm Gladwell had it right with his great book, Blink. Trust your intuition as it’s born of all of your prior knowledge and experience. Let it serve as your default answer/working hypothesis — and then stress test that hypothesis to gain clarity. You can’t be decisive when boiling the ocean — so be sure to start somewhere — and that somewhere should be with your own intuition.

7. Get Comfortable with Tradeoffs. The worst decisions in the world attempt to satisfy everyone, and by doing so, satisfy no-one. Understand, appreciate, and get comfortable with tradeoffs.
7a. Operate in the Shades of Grey. Avoid (like the plague) satisficing strategies, and know that most of life, and business, resides in the shades of grey. Anyone can make an easy A/B decision — but the real glory comes from understanding ambiguity, filling in the information that’s not available with your best guess, and moving forward. You’ll never have perfect information — don’t wait for something that’s never going to arrive.

8. If It’s Wrong, Fix It. The worst decision is often no decision. I know that it’s sexy in business, and especially in areas like M&A, to say the best deals are the deals one didn’t do. Perhaps. But the money guys also know this golden rule — you have to spend a dollar to make a dollar. Which definitionally means — making a good call means making a proactive call. The only way to know if a decision is right, is to make it. Once you realize that almost all decisions can be fixed if wrong, you get increasingly comfortable with the power of making a decision

9. Make Decisions from the Deep End. Don’t wade into the shallow water afraid to make a decision…incrementalism is pernicious. Being a world-class decision-maker means knowing how to make decisions when the stakes are high. Sometimes, the best thing to do is dive into the deep end — and force yourself to be a creative, decisive problem-solver from the inside of a problem (looking out). Get on with it, get into it, and solve inside-out.

10. The Best Decisions Are Guided by a Higher Purpose. Find your center, and be true to it. All the rest is noise that can complicate, if not derail, your clarity of thought and crispness of decision-making. Great decisions are a blend of emotional and rationale persuasions, tugging equally like the ying/yang forces they’re meant to be. Lean into them — and above all, ground your decision in your ultimate purpose. If you do that, you can never make a bad decision, as the principle must always be adhered to no matter the size or seeming gravity of the decision.

And oh yes…one final point. Learn to take full accountability for your decision. The best decision-makers say things like “Hey, I got a lot of input, but it was my call, right or wrong.”

Be sure to own your decisions and watch the confidence of others soar.