Most of your decisions today will be completely wrong
This won’t shock you: you don’t always make the right decisions, writes Chantelle Love, as part of NoTosh’s #theProvocation newsletter.
In fact, very often, we don’t make successful decisions. No matter how thought through you think your ideas might be, in general, humans are overconfident, emotional and irrational.
One study of doctors showed that, even though they were entirely confident of a particular diagnosis, they were, in fact, wrong about 40% of the time. In another survey, 87% decided they would be the most likely to get into Heaven when compared to Michael Jordan and Mother Teresa.
And yet, we expect that the decisions we make will be the right ones.
Expecting to make correct decisions all of the time is not only a false narrative, it leads to perfectionism. Continually striving to make the “right” decision takes away the opportunity to focus on the mission and vision: the real reason behind what you’re doing. That means we can all end up focussing on getting the right result, instead of doing the right thing.
“So as much as possible… Question your own beliefs and confidence [about your decisions].” Tugend, 2013.
There are significant reasons to distribute decision-making beyond those who normally call the shots. When leaders make all of the decisions in their organisation, instead of focusing on the organisation or its mission, the focus becomes the leader.
McKnight and Barringer (2020) suggest that, when a decision is up for debate, leaders who are about 60% certain on a decision should actually side with the 40% of doubt. This tactic demonstrates one crucial thing: that the leader doesn’t always need to “win” and, in turn, the leader builds a culture focussed the organisation’s mission rather than on the leadership.
“You don’t want to become controlling and incapable of listening to the brilliant ideas coming from your employees.” Tank, 2020.
Are you a leader who is too controlling and, potentially, taking attention away from the mission towards yourself? Notice what language people use in meetings or when they pop into your office.
In organisations which focus more on the leader than the mission, people will often use phrases such as, “I would like to…”, “What should I do about…”, “Could we…”
A leader who is continually referring the community’s focus towards the mission, empowers others to make decisions — better decisions than the leader. You’ll instead hear people saying “We intend to…”, “We plan on…”, “We will…” (Cleff, 2015).
What are people in your community saying about decisions?
The Evidence
When You Don’t Do What You Meant To, and Don’t Know Why
How every decision you make is wrong
Decision-making in high performance teams
How to delegate better: seven delegation levels
This was originally written by Chantelle Love for NoTosh’s regular email series, The Provocation. Subscribe now so you never miss a drop! https://mailchi.mp/notosh.com/the-provocation
