The world does not accord with our intuition. A piece of paper, folded forty-two times, reaches the moon. Hard to believe, right?
Imagine for a second that all the (human resources) management styles and procedures you apply, based on intuition, could be totally flawed.
Use data-driven models and analytics to build decision-making frameworks to reduce attribution errors based solely on intuition.
This one minute read is inspired by the writings of Malcolm Gladwell.
Your HR department likely doesn’t have a solid decision-making framework. Your marketing & finance departments on the other hand, probably do. The marketing department might even have automated decision-making based on the above framework. For instance, if revenue within a week doesn’t reach a particular goal by Wednesday, some more ads could be released programmatically.
HR doesn’t have a framework to base decisions on. Reason why? The intricate complexity is ever-changing. The diversity within people is just tremendous and highly contextual.
Before defining and quantifying the parameters within the framework, HR could benefit from agreeing on the outlines of a decision-making framework.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced,” wrote James Baldwin.
In startup entrepreneurship, you have to face everything all at once. Only to suffer from stress because it’s hard to do everything by yourself.
Prioritize what to face first. Better yet, have the market and your customers prioritize it for you. Whatever they feel the strongest about, that’s the challenge you’ll face first.
When you’re out in the sea, drowning, and you see a buoy, you don’t care if that buoy is either closer or farther from shore. You won’t hesitate and consider if this move is increasing or decreasing your chances. You’ll just care about survival.
Even with the best strategical plans in place, and a framework that you can apply to critically assess every move when push comes to shove, the choice is simple, and that’s totally fine.
Aim for having a plan in place that guides every move, allow for deviations anyway.
Some people make decisions for a living. Yes, no, left, right, wait, proceed, increase, decrease. With every decision requiring thinking power and mental capacity, naturally, there is a limit to the number of decisions one can make on a given day.
CEOs showing up in the same outfit, year in year out, is no coincidence. Preserving thinking power for less mundane decisions seems like a smart move.
Whether it’s top CEOs or self-employed people just starting, with no one to make demands, balancing work and life is up to them. No one to impose a schedule, so even seemingly ordinary planning chips away at decision capacity.
On the verge of a potentially life-changing decision, one, presumably, aspires to make that decision as well as they possibly can. Depending on what frameworks and methodologies are being applied, somewhere down the line, a decision matrix could be built, helping you to come to a conclusion.
Jeff Bezos once wrote the following in an annual shareholder letter. “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had, if you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
What happens when 70% is unattainable, but the decision has to be made swiftly? What if the parameters can’t be plotted in a matrix, rendering your decision unmatrixable.
Involve as many people as you can, and trust you’ll do the right thing.
In a world, where many of us seem to agree on the fact that it appears to be spinning increasingly faster around its axis. Where the only constant is change. With thousands of decisions to be made everyday. Certainty is hard to come by. Having faith in a decision, or better yet, the lack thereof, is energy consuming.
Establishing certainty is a fantastic feeling. When you do, cherish and enjoy the moment.
After considering all options for two possible solutions for a challenge. With an extensive pro’s and contra’s list prepared. Having combed through numerous reviews. Involving people to weigh in on the decision… You find yourself still stuck in analysis paralysis, scared to make the wrong choice.
Sometimes the anxiety is more legitimate than other times. Figuring out what to have for dinner or deciding which market to enter next are two completely different things, with entirely different consequences.
Going about (big) decisions diligently is usually a smart approach. Too diligent, however, slows down the process tremendously. If possible, in case of uncertainty, choose both options. Evaluate them shortly after and cancel one out.