PSM Reflections Part 2: Decision-making

The importance of treating yourself as a stakeholder.

I really struggle with decisions. I always have. So when I saw that this week’s individual task was to interrogate our own decision making practices, I was both excited for what could be a very illuminating process of self-examination, but also a little nervous to confront a side of myself that I am a little (read a lot) embarrassed about. It’s no surprise then that I threw myself into the group task while somewhat neglecting this personal one.

In fact, I realise as I write this, that when I say I struggle with decisions, what I really mean is that I struggle with individual decisions. Being involved in collective decision-making, be that consent-based or contributing to advice processes or just more organically as a group: those I’m quite happy to get involved in. I love feeding off of others’ contributions or helping to facilitate a process of mediating different opinions to consolidate and find a common solution with others. What I really don’t like, is making dictatorial or authoritarian decisions (one of the 9 forms we learnt about this week) about myself. This is particularly difficult if that decision has knock-on effects on others (even something as small as expressing what kind of food I feel like eating when deciding what restaurant to go to with friends, is a real challenge for me).

In short, I get a lot of decision anxiety: settling on one thing always feels like I am precluding something else, I can always see things from another point of view, and I struggle to find that inner voice that guides you and tells you: you want x instead of y.

Mapping decisions

So with that slight anxiety and the deadline looming, I sat down and went through it step-by-step, putting my trust in the process.

• Think of an upcoming decision and three past decisions
• Plot them along the risk/duration quadrants
• Name how each decision was made (using the 9 types we discussed in class)
• Reflect on how to approach your upcoming decisions.

Past decisions:

The big glaring one is my recent decision to quit my job and go freelance. VERY HIGH RISK, VERY LONG DURATION.

I wanted to get a feel for the other quadrants though so I also added the decision to cook eggs for breakfast (low risk, low duration) and my recent uptake of daily journaling (low risk, long duration). Both of these were dictatorial/autocratic in nature: one decision-maker deciding alone. As they only really affected me, and were not high risk, no real need for them to be any other way.

Reflect as you go

It is in reflecting about my big decision about quitting my job and going freelance that I see the incredible power of this framing (risk/duration and decision-making types). The first thing to note is that this decision had been “brewing” in me for quite some time (it occurs to me that this is somewhat like the one person equivalent of the “ripening” stage of Generative Decision-Making ).

When I first started having doubts about my job, I did what I often do: a sort of ad-hoc, unstructured advice process. I talk to a lot of people and try to get their input. The advice process is a super valuable tool, in the right circumstance, and if undertaken from the right place. Sometimes when you are grappling with a personal decision, and you struggle (as I do) with connecting to your inner voice to hear what you really want, then most of what it does is add a lot of noise, drowning out that voice even further. I felt a lot of obligation to follow the advice certain people gave, or the approach I thought they wanted me to take. I felt torn and lost all at the same time.

This was both a super risky decision, I had real stakes in the game both in terms of financial consequences but also in terms of the fact I had already de-railed my life once, was I really going to be ok and able to do it again? And it was also super long duration: ok maybe not the going freelance element of it, but it would be pretty hard to un-quit my job once I had done it, so the effects of the decision would be long-lasting. It’s clear that both of those things made it a very weighty and difficult decision, but it wasn’t just that….

When I first started to reflect with the new tools I acquired this week, I thought: I started this decision with an advice approach, but it wasn’t until I shifted into autocratic mode that I was able to actually make a decision. And in some ways that is true: I went back and forth and back and forth and asked a million people for input but it wasn’t until I took charge and discarded a lot of that input and trusted my self and my intuition, that I was able to make the jump.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that that isn’t quite what an autocratic decision is. The end result of an autocratic and an advice-based process is the same: a decision is made by one person. I made the decision to leave my job alone and for myself alone. But I still had a lot of input. The reason why I had struggled so much with this decision wasn’t the fact that I was asking for and receiving advice, it’s that I wasn’t able to filter through that advice… and the reason I wasn’t able to do that is because I had forgotten to include myself in that advice process, as the biggest stakeholder of all.

Now that I look at it from that perspective, I can pinpoint the exact moment I realised that had changed, and I had started listening to myself at least just as much as everyone else. I was talking to my therapist about wanting to take the plunge and hand in my notice, but really struggling with what my parents might think. I was telling her that I felt I needed to have a conversation with my father about this and thinking through how I could frame it to him so he would understand etc… and at one point she almost interrupts me (which she rarely does) and asks if there is anything my father could say that would change my mind. And I pause and think and it just hits me; no. And I notice a calmness and a rootedness I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Our check-out question for the Monday session was all about how a decision feels in our bodies. What a beautiful question; and one that a year or two ago I would not have understood. But I realise as I write this that the way in which I know if a personal decision is right, or even if I feel ok with a collective decision, is how it sits in my body. When I don’t have a sense of my own intuition on it, it feels tight in my chest, like a nervous energy rattling me up. But when I feel secure and strong in my decision, even in a great deal of uncertainty, its like a warm glow radiating down from my chest, grounding me.

I wonder what the collective equivalent of that would be?

Upcoming decision

So how does all this inform how I approach my upcoming decision? I need to decide if I will miss one of our PSM Monday calls in order to attend an event that may help in securing a future consulting opportunity (I’ve labelled this Pitch v PSM in my diagram).

One of the key things I learnt in our group exercise this week, is that context is everything. Much like how in research, the research question determines (or even dictates) the appropriate method; with decision making the nature of the decision, determines the appropriate protocol.

Risk and duration are two key parameters to consider: In my Pitch v PSM, my personal risk is quite high on both sides. On the one hand, I am committed to PSM, it’s only 5 weeks and missing 2 hours of that is a big chunk of time to lose. On the other hand, securing up future income opportunities is really important for me right now. Duration is pretty low (so not a big factor to consider).

But to me there are also two other key parameters:

1. who will need to action the decision
2. who is impacted by the decision

Sometimes the two are one and the same, but not always. In this scenario, I will be doing the action, and I will also be impacted, but my cohort and my facilitators (while not actioning anything) may be impacted by me not being present for a session.

This combo of factors to me calls for a (quick) advice process, to assess how the cohort feels if I would miss a session, and get a sense from them and the facilitators of how much they think they and I would suffer from this. All of this is pretty much in line with what I would instinctively do.

The one very conscious difference I will be making, as a result of this week’s learning and reflection is to block out time to check-in with myself and make sure my inner voice isn’t drowned out in the process of seeking advice and input from others.