The Decision-making Masterclass from an Astronaut

If you have a leak in your spacecraft, you want a leader who takes good decisions, quickly. Never has there been a time where we all need some astronaut decision-making prowess.

Taking good decisions quickly is tough, and expensive. Bad decisions made quickly are cheap short term, but the cost catches you up later. Great decisions taken slowly don’t cost much today, but your organisational horse may have bolted.

Decision-taking is a tough business, and it’s why Leaders (capital ‘L’) get paid the big bucks. If you were one of those Leaders, from whom would you seek advice?

I choose astronauts, every time.

Astronauts are well-trained in taking just that kind of wicked decision, and we can all learn from what they do as we take more crucial decisions than we have maybe ever taken.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s masterclass on leadership is second-to-none. The astronaut who commanded the International Space Station lays out the key ingredients that help a space commander making the right decisions, at the right time, in the right time. The ingredients, when listed out, remind me of those recipes that begin:

“Leave the meat in marinade in the fridge, at least overnight.”

At. Least. Overnight. Three words that have killed the enthusiasm of a hungry chef quicker than gastroenteritis.

But if you want to move from designing great ideas to actually making them happen, then you need more than helpful, simple mental models and a copy of The Decision Book (although both are great purchases). You need to take decisions with your team today, and keep laying the ground for even better decisions tomorrow.

1. Relationships

Good things take time to develop. Relationships will help you survive in space, but you take care of them in the five years before you go up. “There’s no point needing to build a relationship when something goes wrong…”. Most organisations will have discovered if their relationships are strong or weak already. While finding the eject pod for some of those who have not stepped up recently might be challenging, for all sorts of reasons, that doesn’t mean you can’t recalibrate your leadership team. If you’re already in a time of crisis with a weak team, start concentrating on this who are strong, whether they have the word ‘leader’ in their job title or not. You need to bring your A Team to work every day. Now is not the time to take on the whole job yourself — you’ll never manage. So find those who can be in your A Team, and worry about job titles, pay and conditions later. That part-time teacher who’s asked if they can work extra to cope with additional spacing of students? Leader. That student nurse who’s forgone his last year of study to tackle minor injuries while specialists take care of Coronavirus patients? Leader. Now: how are going to use them before they drift off again to normality?

2. Really Clear Objectives

The second key ingredient is having a clear idea of the objectives you’re there to meet, come what may. Hadfield’s are simple enough for non-astronauts to understand:

1. Stay alive.

2. Keep the ship alive.

3. Get as much done as you can while you’re in operations up there.

4. Enjoy doing it so much you want to do it again.

Your objectives should also be understood by the youngest person in your community. Plain English. Measurable (alive? yes!). Exciting. At the moment, there are some international or private schools might see their Objectives might reading like this:

1. Retain 90% of our current students, whatever it takes.
2. Make every learning moment, whether in school or at home, delightful.

3. Creative Juice, not Intellectual Fumes

No matter what happens, these objectives don’t change. And they offer a creative opportunity for aspiring leaders, those choosing to step up at the moment. For example, how do you retain 90% of your current students, whatever it takes? The only answer to this question is: bring in a creative crew to find out. The might come up with some ideas, like these:

• call every parent who owns a company and ask if they’re alright or need a payment holiday for a few months.
• survey every student to find out what’s worked and what’s not worked this past few months — and call up the ones who aren’t happy to find out how they’d like to co-design something different.
• pay a bonus to all teaching staff for their effort — not in cash, but in access to professional development opportunities next year that you’ve organised at a ridiculously cheap rate.

These three ideas are the result of one person having a think for 90 seconds. Now, if you engaged your whole community in the exercise you’d be spoilt for amazing, creative ideas to achieve your objective. None of them come without that collaboration, and none of them are achievable without collaboration and delegation.

4. Make a bloody decision

Having lots of options is less stressful than choosing one of them.

Choosing one of them is strategy.

David Ogilvy said “strategy is sacrifice”. Sacrifice is what decision-taking is all about.

What are you not going to do is a decision, just as much as what you’re going to do.

But when you’ve had plenty of ideas in, there comes a point where a decision needs taken. And that voice — the passive voice — is your biggest enemy.

A decision needs taken.

Turn it into an active voice instead.

I will take the decision. The Board will take the decision. The community will vote and take the decision.

Once you’ve made the decision to try something, you can then inspire, ask or tell others to do the something. But decision-making needs input (creative ideas to choose from) and execution (choosing one of them, and the team who’ll ship it). And it needs someone to manage that process, to lead it. If you’re a leader, that’s you.

Back to the International Space Station (ISS).

The level of competence of astronauts on the ISS is rather high, and so the normal day-to-day hierarchy is pretty flat. People get on with their (specialist) jobs and know when and how to collaborate. The role of the Commander is subtle: before launch it’s all about developing a team, and during the voyage that focus shifts to making sure they feel protected and fulfilled as they go about realising the mission’s Objective.

And then there’s a problem. A gas leak, for example. You might get one breath before it’s ‘goodnight’.

In a crisis there is no subtlety.

The command structure snaps from flat to a sharp vertical. Decisions need to be swift, clearly communicated and rapidly “made so” by the whole crew.

And, if that works, the crisis will be over. And things need to ease back into flat trusting professionalism as quickly as possible.

Moving from vertical hierarchical decisions to more collegial, agile peer leadership isn’t easy. There is no magic button under your desk. And if a leader doesn’t make the move, they’ll suffer: they simply do not have the bandwidth to be effective as they consider all the continuing, but more minor, circling emergencies. The ideas, perspectives and expertise of the many will best serve the organisation’s future.

Moving from design to decisions, even when the decisions are imperfect, is a must.

In a crisis, it’s all about taking decisions

Over the past few months, we’ve noticed people invoking the Chinese word for “crisis” to provide some hope: in Western cultures, it’s been interpreted often as two characters meaning “Danger and Opportunity”.

This isn’t entirely true. The word “crisis” in Chinese has the same significance as its more familiar Greek linguistic cousin, krisis: there is “danger at the point of juncture”. In other words, and leaning more on ancient Greek, we’re at a turning point, and it could go either way. We’re all in critical care at the moment.

When you’re in critical care, therefore, it is important to clear the decks of all that ‘busy work’ and beeping machines that don’t matter, and concentrate on the things that do.

What matters to your organisation most?

The answer should be easy: it should be contained in your organisation’s statement of purpose, or its mission. But all too often, missions in the world of learning and education are full of truisms, platitudes and clichés.

The current set of crises are up front and centre, and they’re all fighting for our attention. Climate, health, race, and economic challenges are all crises: we have failed over some time, and we are now at the point where we must take decisions. They’re all at the point where we can make a positive difference and improve our world. But equally we could get it wrong, collectively, and make matters worse. The result of that would be fatal.

We’re also seeing more tired leadership teams, tanks half-empty, with uncertainty ahead. This is more than challenging for a group of professionals who have enjoyed the sensation, at least, of planability.

So when you’re short of time, energy, economic security, safety and certainty, how on earth do you guide the quick decision-making that we need?

You go to your purpose. Every time.

The best time to rethink your purpose was some time before January, with a cool head, and your whole community behind you. It’s what we’ve done for years with organisations. And when the crisis hit the fan, those organisations who embraced their renewed purpose were well-placed to focus on just one thing: fulfilling their reason for being.

The second best time to rethink your purpose is now. If the students in your school or the staff in your remote offices cannot remember the wording of your purpose, and don’t know how it translates into their own daily decision-making, ditch the perspex plaque on the wall and start again.

But use this as an opportunity to bring your community together, not to rewrite it in your home office. Bring your community together in events, celebrations, design sessions and interviews, to understand what makes your school or organisation so special. And then engage with a fresh pair of eyes — a critical friend from outside — to make sense of it with you.

When you craft a mission in Plain English, one that’s both memorable and usable as a daily decision-making tool, then you’ll have activated your entire community to cope with the “danger at the point of juncture”.

And your entire community will be activated to take decisions, for themselves.

Ewan McIntosh is the CEO and founder of global learning agency, NoTosh. The firm develops strategy, and re-articulates the purpose and values of the world’s most innovative, forward-looking, successful schools.