You've got no more information... but make a decision!

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Ahoy,

Today we’re going to cover an extremely common problem faced by leaders at all levels, and I’m going to take you through how I taught leaders to make decisions quickly, under pressure, without all the information.

When teaching submarine combat engagements, a key part of this was having the teams learn how to make decisions on the fly.

The thing is, this isn’t limited to fighting submarines, you can use this in your day to day leadership!

Let’s jump in.

Undoubtedly you will face decisions at work.

And as a leader, there is often consequences to making the wrong decision.

So naturally we want to make the right decisions… makes sense!

However, I’ve seen people freeze in this situation. Unwilling to make the decision out of fear of making the wrong one.

I’ve seen this happen at every level up the chain of command, from extremely new leaders to very senior ones.

Human nature is human nature, and nobody wants to look bad.

Except here’s the kicker: Deciding not to make a decision until you know it’s 100% the correct one, is a decision.

On top of that, it’s a really unhelpful one!

You will almost never have all of the information, and you will almost never be able to say for certain which option is the “correct” one.

All you can do is make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time.

And hey, guess what?

If you get more information down the line, or it becomes clear that it wasn’t the best option, just change course.

Hold your hands up and say: “I made the decision based on x, y, z information, we now have new information, therefore we’re going to change the approach to this…”

I promise you, people would prefer that to sitting around doing nothing, waiting for a decision to be made. Or to working really hard on the wrong option because you refused to change to option 2 when you received new information because you were scared of admitting that you picked the wrong option in the first place.

When we were training command teams on submarine engagements the tempo would be kept high.

It’s stressful training, if people start to get the hang of things, we make it harder to keep the stress up. It’s great fun! And great training.

When things are moving quickly, decisions need to be made quickly.

And in a scenario that is consistently changing, it is incredibly difficult to get the perfect answer out there every time.

However, you need to do something!

You can’t just sit back and do nothing or you’ll fail the training. So we needed to teach people to make those decisions quickly.

The basis is simple, accept you’ll never have all the information.

Make the decision on the information you have.

If it’s wrong, adjust.

As long as you can justify what you’re doing at any given time frame, it’s all good.

If new information emerges and you adapt, that’s great! That’s the point.

Then practise.

We don’t do one scenario then give up. We run it over and over again until the decision making becomes smoother.

Because here’s the thing, it’s a skill. And like any skill, you can train it.

So how do you make better decisions?

You make more decisions.

I know it can be daunting, and like I said, nobody wants to look bad. But this is what you get paid for. As a leader, this is literally your job. You’ll get better at it the more you do it, I promise.

So here’s what I’ll leave you with:

• You’ll never have all the information.

• Make the best decision you can anyway (in a timely fashion).

• Adapt to new information as it comes in.

• Practise. Commit to making decisions and learn from them.

As always, have a great day.

Reece

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