Decision Reviews
How good are the decisions you're making? How do you even come to the conclusion for that assessment?
Making decisions is similar to driving in that nobody wants to admit they are bad or even mediocre at it.
But we make an estimated 35,000 decisions a day and studies have shown that the quality of those decisions degrades as the day goes on. Studies also suggest that 40-50% of decisions made in organizations are ineffective.
Maybe we're not as good at making decisions as we thought.
There is an easy way to address this. It's a self-development strategy we can use to better understand the quality of our decisions so that our future performance is more informed. Here are the tips on how to do it…
Self-focused
This is meant to be a tool to help evolve your personal decision making abilities.
This is not a meant to be a formal debrief where a group gets together to pore over all the information and outcomes. In order to prevent it from becoming overwhelming, I recommend starting this exercise with just your really big decisions.
We also don't want to worry about reporting our findings to our boss or other 3rd party. For now, this is just an internal feedback system for our own personal growth.
Predictions
The first step comes once you have made the decision but before you have started to execute the plan. At this stage, you're going to briefly document the decision, the expected outcome and why you believe that outcome to be the case.
This might sound like: "We are going to remove steps 7 through 9 from our process due to unnecessary redundancies. By doing so, we expect to reduce our costs by $1,200 a month without our quality metrics falling below standard."
It's important to do this before you start implementing the decision in order to keep your results honest. If you do this step after you already have results, it's easy to justify the difference between what you thought would happen and what actually happened.
I also recommend keeping all of these predictions in one location. Maybe it's a single notebook or a word document on your computer. Having it in one location will make it easier to identify trends and observations down the line.
Results
Once the change is implemented and enough time has passed for your results to be available, you're simply going to compare those results to your original prediction.
If the results were exactly as expected, or even fairly close…that's great! Even with the accuracy, were there any surprises? Make note of any additional observations as to why your predictions were so accurate and move on.
Inaccurate predictions
If your predictions proved to be inaccurate, take note of the gap. What, based on the advantage of hindsight, led to those inaccurate predictions?
Remember, this doesn't have to be a formal deep-dive analysis. Just a few minutes noting what factors you may not have fully considered that led to a different outcome.
Trend it
This is where it can get interesting. If you've kept all of these notes in one place, you now have a document full of brief observations about your ability to predict outcomes for big decisions.
I recommend reviewing this document once or twice a year to see what trends you notice. You may notice that you underestimate how often upstream business partners impact your decisions. Or you may notice that you're too optimistic with project timelines.
Whatever you find, you now have insightful feedback that most people never even consider obtaining. This is feedback on your cognitive tendencies and ability to make sound predictions. The longer you do this, the better you become at both.
This Week's Action Items:
Document your predictions for big decisions in one central location. Do this before you or your team begins executing the plan.
Once the decision has been fully implemented, compare the actual results to your original predictions. Regardless of the outcome, make note of any surprises or variations.
Review this document occasionally to identify and address cognitive trends or tendencies.
