LESSON: If you want to be a creative, visionary, strategic leader you have to create the space to be clear about what you think, make bold decisions, and communicate these with confidence.
HANS IS THE FINANCE DIRECTOR for a key market in the Asia-Pacific region of a huge multinational. He has always had ambitions to become the global CFO, and even, one day, CEO. But his career has stalled, and from what he has picked up, he has been labelled as someone who doesn’t quite have what it takes to reach the top. He has asked his HR Director if he can have some coaching to get to the bottom of this. Hence, here he was sitting across from me.
It was interesting to meet Hans and I was glad I’d insisted we met face to face, at least for our initial session. I always schedule these to last for three hours. That allows me to really hear the coachee’s story and get a real sense of what they want to achieve. If they have flown in to see me, or if, as in this case, I’d flown halfway around the world to see them, I would follow this first, deep-dive session with a follow-up, goal-setting session the day after. That way, the bother and expense will at least result in a kick-start to the coaching that we can carry on, if necessary, virtually.
In person Hans was a strange mixture. I carry a rough scale of executives in my head that runs between two points:
Hans was certainly on the left of that continuum. Not that this is necessarily bad. One of the best known business books, Good to Great by Jim Collins, identifies – and lauds – what he calls a Level 5 leader who is quieter, more reflective and less showy than the Alpha Male stereotype we invariably associate with the so-called ‘natural leader’.
Nonetheless, Hans may have taken this a bit far. He seemed subdued, even bland, and rather than create energy in the room, he seemed to drain it. Weirdly, though, there were moments when he would suddenly come alive and be really clear, assertive and almost mesmerising.
I suspected that the wider issues that brought Hans to see me would be explained if we could understand this contradictory dynamic. As he told me his story I began to see its genesis.
Hans had grown up as the youngest child in a fundamentalist religious family where humility was the family watchword. If he ever behaved in a bold or loud way, his parents and even his elder siblings would admonish him. His successes were to be enjoyed without fuss; pride in any achievements a cardinal sin. Only one ‘person’ could decide anything definitive, and that was God, as expressed through the Bible.
His father and mother would preside over the family dinner table, orchestrating debates in which the children were expected to contribute in a quiet, humble way, but only if they had something really insightful to say. If they got carried away, or said something that the forbidding patriarch and matriarch felt was glib or foolish, one of them would smack their hand down on the table, shaking the crockery and cowing them into silence. Even worse than this parental chastisement was how Hans felt when his elder brother and sister took his parents’ side against him, being even more critical and belittling than mother and father.
I said I would leave Hans alone in the room on his own for five minutes and asked him to think about what this might have caused him to be like. When I returned he looked blank. Sometimes, as in Rachel’s case, the coachee gets there on their own, other times I have to offer an interpretation.
‘Let me make a suggestion, Hans. I think many people would have ended up feeling cowed, that their contributions are not valuable, and maybe they would err on keeping their mouth closed, or not really committing to what they think.’ Hans was silent, looking down and picking at his nails.
‘It is exactly what I feel like in board meetings,’ he eventually said in a low voice, ‘unless I am talking about finance, of course.’
Those last few words were crucial. Hans’s pathogenic belief was that he was only able to contribute effectively, even passionately, when he felt he was the expert – but even a degree out of that comfort zone would mean he hadn’t very much to say. This made him an OK country finance director, but really strong FDs need to be able to actively contribute to general commercial debate, as well as be subject matter experts. As for being a CEO, forget it. There was none of the confident broad mastery, curiosity, agility, ability to connect and synthesise, qualities that people need from the man or woman at the top. Hans was unable to contribute to wider strategic discussions with views that were cut-through and decisive, and this failure kept him firmly in his finance function box. Yet I had a gut instinct that there was more to Hans than this. We went to work.
As well as processing some of the fear and shame he’d felt growing up, which hung around him like a cloak even now forty years later, we also looked at what thinking – and communicating strategically – is all about. I got him to complete a short survey on Strategic Intelligence (SQ), which I have developed (based on Michael Maccoby’s book Strategic Intelligence). The survey asks around twenty questions that explore your strengths and weaknesses around foresight, visioning, and inspiring. I often find that this helps identify where people are weak in terms of the different elements of thinking and acting strategically. We also looked at how he could tap more into his intuition, and I suggested he read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. Finally, we worked on his executive presence and charisma; he would certainly gain from exuding a bit more passion and enthusiasm, even if he was never going to give people the old razzle-dazzle.
In terms of changing his problem behaviour, we decided that he would start slowly, with him committing to giving a firm view, just once, about something not in his area of expertise in a forthcoming meeting, and seeing how that landed – and how it made him feel. We agreed to speak before that meeting to tee him up for it, and afterwards to debrief on how it had been.
When the day of his meeting came along, I found myself slightly nervous on his behalf, but it turned out that the Skype call he made immediately afterwards was one of the most fulfilling calls I have ever had. Hans was beaming with pride. He told me about how he had spoken up about a marketing decision (as we’d discussed he would), initially fearfully, but that as he felt the room slowly paying attention he’d lost his nerves. Eventually the Chief Marketing Officer had asked bluntly, ‘Well, what would you do Hans?’ This had forced him to take a small gulp and give his view, which had ended up carrying the day. After the meeting the CEO had come up to him and thanked him for raising his point. As he told me this I could see him holding back his pleasure. I told him not to. Separated though we were by 3,000 miles, we had a mini-celebration, high-fiving our screens. Hans looked younger, more vibrant, more like Superman than his drab alter ego.
We’d had what some psychoanalysts would call a ‘corrective emotional experience’. I thought of how grim things must have been for him growing up in such a crushing environment. ‘Fuck the lot of you,’ I thought as, through the virtual ether, Hans visibly glowed.
‘you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might go wrong.’
Michelle Obama
Hans’s story may not seem at first reading to be about making decisions, but it illustrates the essential first step to deciding anything – knowing what you think, and having the confidence to express it. Having the inner confidence to nail your colours to the mast and be held accountable for what you’ve decided – whether you prove to be right or wrong – is one of the true tests of leadership. Yet the art and science of decision-making is fraught with difficulty.
First, consider the sheer scale of things. We live in a world where we are bombarded with the need to make countless decisions. It is claimed that we make around 35,000 decisions a day as adults – if this seems like a high estimate, researchers at Cornell University claim that we make over 200 choices every day on food alone. Even if our childhood experiences don’t cast a shadow over our decision-making faculties, as Hans’s did, the here-and-now is so chaotic that it can wear out even the most resilient and decisive of us. In a world where a ‘half-soy skinny decaf organic chocolate iced vanilla double-shot frappuccino’ is a genuine order for a cup of coffee, it is no wonder that decisions can feel overwhelming. Working in a knowledge economy requires us to make a multitude of decisions daily within a complex environment full of intersecting, fluid factors. This almost universal nature of such working lives has an unavoidable psychological component as we are forced to navigate seemingly endless considerations, possible outcomes and power dynamics. It’s enough to make anyone want to escape for a coffee!
In addition to having to deal with the stressful here-and-now, many of us are carrying a hidden world of memories and deeply held assumptions from the ‘there-and-then’ – our pasts. Perhaps even more than the outer world, it is our inner world that causes us a multitude of problems when it comes to making decisions. What often looks like a reasonable, rational approach to decision-making – weighing up the pros and cons, googling multiple perspectives, asking mentors, friends and the family cat for their opinion – can mask deeper psychological dynamics that may be playing out. Often, it masks fear: fear of getting it wrong, fear of emotional discomfort, fear of looking stupid, fear of losing our safety, security or reputation. We are often not cognisant of much of this psychological material – it lurks beneath the surface, ever so slightly beyond our awareness.
In Hans’s case, it was not simply a lack of skill that inhibited him from making more of an impact; he was haunted by decades-old fear and shame, driven by an out-of-date need to protect himself by not voicing his own views. His formative relationships with his parents and siblings had heavily shaped his conception of authority and power; it was in these early experiences that he learned what he needed to do and who he needed to be in order to avoid punishment, rejection and criticism. Hans isn’t alone in having learned his most foundational lessons about authority in relationship to his caregivers and siblings; since humans are wired to be social animals, we are all impacted by those primary relationships, and it is in those early experiences that many of our deepest fears are rooted. If this early learning goes well, we develop confidence in our own decision-making abilities. If it doesn’t, we learn to hedge our bets and rely on our elders (or ‘superiors’) to take our decisions for us. That way we can never be wrong, but we also never get a chance to be right.
The problems Hans encountered in his role as an FD were fundamentally connected to his beliefs and experiences of power, authority and leadership. Committing to an opinion in his childhood risked exposing him to the undoubtedly frightening experience of one of his parents smacking their hand down on the table or being ostracised by his siblings, experiences which at that time in his life were painful, even traumatic. Alas, for Hans, as is invariably the case, the coping strategy that had served him so well in childhood had begun to limit him in adulthood. His fears were running the show. He needed to grow into being able to make decisions from an emotionally and psychologically adult space. Having these fears didn’t make Hans weak or a failure; they simply made him human.
In previous roles, Hans had been able to get away with not contributing his broader, more strategic thoughts or opinions, but once promoted, he discovered that a lack of bold views and clear decisions is one of the least desirable qualities in a leader and one of the fastest ways to lose your colleagues’ respect. Marie Beynon Ray, who edited Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, put it well: ‘Indecision is fatal. It is better to make a wrong decision than build up a habit of indecision. If you’re wallowing in indecision, you certainly can’t act – and action is the basis of success.’
During a focus group I attended with a major UK retailer, a senior member of staff commented that although the business was supposed to be operating in a fast, ultra-responsive environment, in reality there were often so many decisions that needed to be referred up to more senior managers – decisions that would often be late in coming – that the entire buying process often virtually ground to a halt. This was resulting in stock arriving in stores on the tail end of trends rather than at their peak. The impact of this drag on decision-making was proving potentially devastating for the business. Getting people to make better, faster decisions was, in this case, worth millions.
Long before I became a psychologist I worked in politics and saw how different political leaders would handle decision-making. Along with having a lot of self-confidence, a vision they could communicate, and the ability to build relationships with all sorts of people, what differentiated the real leaders from the mediocre was the ability to make decisions speedily, and without angst. The best example of the former was Tony Blair.
In the 1990s, as Chief Aide to the politician Peter Mandelson (a future Secretary of State for Business and European Commissioner for Trade), I had a ringside seat as the UK Labour Party transformed itself into the more modern electable New Labour. I saw how Tony Blair ruthlessly focused on what mattered, yet also made the space to build relationships across the political spectrum and beyond. Even more impressively, he also got home most evenings to have tea with his kids. In 1996, before he became Prime Minister, I was setting up Progress, a think tank. This was an attempt to create a ‘cadre’ of moderates, and was seen as important to the success of the government he was planning. I had convinced David Sainsbury, the supermarket billionaire, to donate a substantial amount to make the idea happen. I went to Blair’s house to discuss the idea. He made me a cup of tea and we went outside and sat in his garden. After hearing me outline my proposal for a couple of minutes (the PPT slides I had slaved over left untouched on his lap), he said he’d heard enough, fired off a few questions, drained his mug, stretched and said, ‘OK, let’s go for it, but for God sakes keep JP [his deputy] on board.’ He then nodded over to the park beyond the back wall of his garden and shouted for his kids: ‘Euan, Nicky, let’s play some football. Wanna join us?’ he asked. Other politicians would have discussed the idea ad infinitum, brought in all sorts of people to comment on and review it, and, ultimately, not have been bold enough to do it. Not Blair.
Peter Mandelson himself displayed many of the characteristics of a natural leader, but along with his powerful intellect, his greatest strengths were focus and determination. I remember once driving with him to his constituency in Hartlepool. It had been a long hard week and, understandably exhausted, he closed his eyes and napped in the car. After twenty minutes or so, his eyes snapped open and, from somewhere, he found the energy to pick up his laptop and dash off a series of emails: suggesting ideas, challenging people, making judgement calls, pushing things forward. Blair called it Peter’s ‘laser-like’ focus, and he was right.
*
Creating the space to make good, speedy decisions requires the acceptance of three psychological realities. First, decisions will often cause you anxiety; second, you will never have all the information you need; and third, you will sometimes get things wrong. But that’s all OK.
Decisions – or the change associated with them – can generate anxiety due to what psychologists call ‘status quo bias’, in which we subconsciously prefer not to make decisions so as to keep things familiar and, so say our brains, ‘safe’. The human brain evolved to associate uncertainty with danger, and will go to any lengths to evade this danger. Unless we consciously acknowledge that we are susceptible to our evolutionary impulse to ‘stay safe’ by maintaining the status quo, we run the risk of buying into the lie that we just need a little bit more information or time to make the decision.
This takes us to the second reality we must face. You can’t expect to have all the facts at your disposal before you make a decision. The world is too complex and messy for that. A good decision maker tries to assemble all the data, but a great decision maker knows she can’t, and that at a certain point she has enough to go on.
As well as embracing the inevitable anxiety of decision-making and the need to act without perfect information, we must also accept the final reality: that we might get it wrong. I was in Silicon Valley a couple of years ago where I discussed this with a senior tech executive who told me of the popular phrase that informs much of the decision making in the big companies out there: ‘Done is better than perfect.’ In any given situation, there are so many unknowns, variables, ambiguities and constantly changing factors that it is literally impossible to arrive at a ‘right’ answer. Weighing and balancing perspectives can easily become an endless process; at some point, you have to decide to sacrifice an imaginary perfect decision with one that is good enough, and you have to risk getting it wrong.
Similarly, it can be helpful to remind yourself that a bad decision is better than no decision (within reason), and the experience of countless explorers, entrepreneurs and leaders bears this out. Arianna Huffington, the author of Thrive and founder of the Huffington Post, says, ‘We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.’ Then there is Richard Branson, whose entrepreneurial journey has been full of ups and downs. Many of his 400+ businesses have been hugely successful, but he has also endured quite a number of public failures, such as Virgin Cola or Virgin Cars, as well as at least one brush with death. When flying a hot air balloon across the Atlantic in 1987, he and his co-pilot lost their fuel and calculated that they had a 5 per cent chance of surviving, eventually crash landing in Northern Ireland. His many unsuccessful business ventures do his words justice: ‘Even if things do fall short and the decision turns out to be not so great, you stand to learn so much more from making a bad decision than you do from not making a decision at all. After all, failure is life’s greatest teacher.’ Embracing or at least being willing to accept the possibility of failure is a hallmark of a leadership mindset.
There are, however, certain particular circumstances when deferring a decision makes sense. Decision fatigue describes perfectly the exhaustion we can all experience from being bombarded by choices and decisions we need to make on a daily basis. The more we are required to decide, the worse the quality of those decisions. A research study published by the National Academy of Sciences found more concrete evidence of decision fatigue. The study of judges’ judicial rulings demonstrated that the biggest factor influencing them was not the crime, gender or ethnicity of the offender, or anything else related to the crime itself; the biggest predictor of whether the judge would award parole or not was the time of day, and therefore how cognitively overloaded (aka tired) they were. The researchers found that of the 1,112 rulings they reviewed over a ten-month period, the most favourable decisions were made early in the morning or immediately after a break, when 65 per cent of parole requests would be approved. As the morning wore on, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favourable ruling steadily dropped until it reached zero, even if the case was almost identical to an early morning case. The same pattern repeated after lunch; immediately after food and a break, the judges’ parole approval levels spiked once again, returning to 65 per cent, but as the afternoon wore on, decision fatigue returned. As decision fatigue sets in, people become what researchers call ‘cognitive misers’, hoarding their energy and ignoring complex and contradictory considerations. They become highly susceptible to making an impulsive decision. The lesson? Prioritise your most important, cognitively complex decisions for early in the morning or immediately after a break, take frequent breaks (every 90 minutes is a good rule of thumb, even if it’s just a quick stretch or breath of fresh air) and make sure you eat and drink regularly. Especially when people’s freedom is at stake!
Avoiding decision fatigue has led some leaders to try and minimise the number of decisions they face. Steve Jobs famously wore the same outfit every day – the iconic black polo neck and jeans – so that he never had to think about what to wear. Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur, investor and author, eats the same breakfast each morning, and the former US President Barack Obama used one-word replies to answer his low-priority emails, simply choosing either Agree, Disagree or Discuss. He, like Steve Jobs, also minimised decision fatigue over what to wear, explaining: ‘You’ll see I wear only grey or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’
Luckily, most of us have fewer – and less world-changing – decisions to make than the President of the United States. Yet the forbidding atmosphere around Hans’s dinner table when he was growing up meant that having a view and articulating it decisively felt like it was ‘life or death’ even when it wasn’t. To break free of that bind, Hans had to accept the great irony in all this – that in order to offer an answer, you have to accept you may not necessarily have the answer. But, hey, maybe I’m wrong.
As we have observed, one of the barriers to good decisions is ‘too much information’. So let’s begin by stripping things down to their essentials using another model, the Deciding Cycle. This has clear parallels with the Reflecting Cycle (see p. 32), the main difference being that whereas the Reflecting Cycle has no end, the Deciding Cycle has – as indicated by the break in the circle at the top left-hand side. Reflection never ends; decisions are – at least for a moment – a clear and unambiguous end.
The Deciding Cycle
It is useful to compare and contrast the three elements of thinking we have looked at in Part 1:
| Type of thinking Focus | Dynamic | |
| Reflection | Primarily yourself but also the world | Open up, close somewhat but stay open for more |
| Learning | Primarily the world but also yourself | Open up and keep opening up |
| Decision | A particular issue or question | Open up and then close |
Give every important decision you have to make the attention it deserves and ruthlessly carve out the time to think deeply about it. Review the four types of space and see how your preferences around each will improve your ability to make decisions:
As with all thinking it’s important to find the space to make your decisions in a considered way. As well as carving out the time itself, if possible try and think in stages. Have an initial deliberation to scope out the problem – what my dad calls ‘seeing the rabbit’ – and then come back to it, ideally a few days later. There is a reason for the phrase ‘let me sleep on it’. If you can, create the space around decisions that allow your unconscious mind and your intuition a chance to do their thing.
Again, give some thought to the best environment for you to take decisions. Try to take them in as stress-free, relaxed a setting as possible. Try and avoid being bounced into making calls when you are not in the right frame of mind or emotional mood. One executive I worked with refused to make any decisions of consequence in his office and would slip out for a breath of fresh air and a stroll, mulling things over and only coming back to the office when he’d made up his mind.
The language around decision-making is bodily based: Are you using your head or your heart? Are you listening to your gut? There is a reason for this. Our ‘thinking’ doesn’t always take place in the brain. We are not ‘psyche’ separate from ‘soma’ – that mind and body split so often evoked. We are, in fact, as psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott expressed it, ‘psyche-soma’.
A practical and very physical way to experience this is through an exercise I call ‘Decision Jumps’. It is designed to make space, to give pause during your thinking, and allow you to listen, literally, to the wisdom of your body.
First think of a decision you have to, or want to, make. It doesn’t have to be a life-changing one but something with a little more jeopardy than what to have for lunch.
OK, now slim down the options to just two. For ease let’s call these options A and B.
Sit down comfortably in an empty room and assign a random place to option A and another place, as far from place A as possible, to option B. For example option A may be near the window, option B near the radiator. When I do this in coaching I ask the person to draw a big circle on paper and write down the choice in the circle, and then lay these, far apart, on the floor. For example:
Next go and stand in one of the spaces. Move about a bit, jiggle, get settled in that space.
Then close your eyes and bring to mind that choice. Pay attention to any thoughts or feelings that come up for you, and any bodily sensations.
Next take a jump (or a run and jump depending how big your room is) and end up in the place that represents the other option.
Again, settle in and close your eyes. What thoughts, feelings and sensations do you have in this space? How do they contrast with what you felt in the other place?
Now jump from one space to another, what happens to you? What comes to the fore, what recedes, what does your body tell you about each possibility?
In the dozens of times I have done this exercise I have never known one place not be clearly more attractive or comfortable to my coachee. Some emotion like ‘excitement’ say, or a sense such as ‘safety’ will become manifest in the person’s actual body.
Astonishingly, one of the two places will feel right – will be the place you want to be. Your body will tell you what your mind alone cannot.
The points already explored in previous chapters apply here. Think about the right balance between making decisions on your own and consulting others. But don’t let doing the latter delay you or waylay you. Have a clear sense of who you are asking and why, and retain accountability for having the final say.
Incidentally, if you’re engaged in decision making as a group it can be useful to switch people around so that the proponents of one solution have to argue their opponents’ case and vice versa. Not only does this tend to increase empathy for the different views on offer (for as someone once quipped, ‘We think therefore we differ’), it simultaneously depersonalises and deepens debate.
The final way of using other people to help you create space to focus on the decisions that really matter is to use others to reduce the number of decisions you have to make. I come across many executives who hoard decision-making, as if somehow their status or worth depends on how many decisions they take – even when the decisions are ‘below their paygrade’. We will look at delegating more comprehensively in Chapter 9, but for now it’s worth considering that if you have people to delegate to, don’t just delegate tasks, delegate decision making too. Only intervene when it really matters and don’t second-guess your team’s decisions. I know of one highly paid consultant who would stand over his PA’s shoulder tinkering with how she laid out his PPT slides. I kid you not, there was one day when I knew his client had been desperate for the deck since that morning and yet he was still in the office at 7.00 pm, exasperated PA in tow, fiddling around with what exact shade of blue to use. Hours of highly valuable time wasted on what Sue Macmillan, who helps run UK website Mumsnet, scornfully calls ‘faffing’. He could have left such second-order decisions to his PA and had the presentation with the client on time. The Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby has a great phrase that can be applied here – ‘scraping the barnacles off the boat’.
ASK YOURSELF: Have I passed on all decisions that I don’t have to take? Am I concentrating on the things that only I can decide and that are of critical importance?
In order to be in the best mental state to make decisions, we need to ensure that we are aware of our biases and have done as much as we can to eliminate them. We also need to make sure that we are tapping into both sides of our brain – the right-hand or intuitive, creative side, and the left-hand, more analytical side (there isn’t much scientific justification for this notion of brain duality by the way, so just treat it as a useful metaphor).
Recognising our biases
Most human beings live under a great delusion – that we are rational, logical creatures who seek out the best for ourselves. Well, psychology and behavioural economics would indicate otherwise. First, as the stories of Raku, Rachel and Hans show, we can be prisoners of our core pathogenic beliefs, which cloud our judgement and perception. But even when these aren’t present, there are a huge range of cognitive and personal biases at play that undermine our ability to make the best decisions objectively. These all crowd out the mental space we need for making clear, unbiased, optimal decisions. During my work with clients I have identified the ten that seem to crop up again and again:
1. Confirmation bias – we tend to see facts that match our existing views or prejudices and not those that challenge them, however ‘open minded’ we think we are.
2. Illusion of control – we like to believe we are more in control of things than we actually are, so assume things will go our way.
3. Optimism bias – we overestimate the likelihood of good things happening and underestimate the chance of bad things happening.
4. Source credibility – we tend to accept things from people who are similar to us, or who we like more, rather than those who differ from us, or we don’t like.
5. Repetition effect – we pay disproportionate attention to things that we have heard before, or heard several times.
6. Prospect theory – we are biased towards outcomes that minimise losses rather than maximise gains.
7. Recency – we tend to take more account of things that happened recently and less account of things that happened a while ago.
8. Anchoring – in contradiction to ‘recency’, at other times we are overly influenced by the first thing that we discovered or experienced.
9. Groupthink – we will tend – unknowingly – to conform to the consensus (or what we perceive to be the consensus) in a group we are part of.
10. Sunk cost fallacy – we persevere with things even when we have realised they won’t work, just because we’ve already put time and effort into them.
ASK YOURSELF: How many of these biases might I be susceptible to when I think I am acting rationally? What can I do to minimise these biases?
Using your head and your heart
As we saw in Raku’s story, there are two methods we all draw on when deciding things – analysis and intuition. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge says, ‘People … cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.’
Nonetheless, it is worth attempting to tease out these methodologies when taking important decisions. Spend time consciously and deliberately gathering and interrogating data, using all your analytical rigour to surface patterns and conclusions that illuminate the matter in hand. Then make the space to step back from all that and check in with your ‘gut’.
I tend to find that even in those disciplines where you would expect analysis to be at a premium (for example finance), the best people, and those that rise to the top as leaders, draw heavily on their intuition. One CFO I worked with said that he hadn’t used his forensic analytical powers for years. ‘These days,’ he said, ‘it’s about my gut – how do these figures feel to me. If I had to stop and analyse everything, I would literally drown in numbers. Sometimes I think it’s more art than science – even magic at times.’ And he laughed.
Incidentally, as I noted earlier, the language around intuition is interesting. We tend to either say ‘gut’ or ‘heart’. I think that ‘gut’ carries the echo of a second meaning – not just our ‘non-brain’ instincts but also something to do with courage – having the guts to believe in yourself and your view, which, outside of his technical specialism, Hans didn’t have. Heart is interesting too because it raises an important point about intuition: it’s not just the sum total of your absorbed experience but also relates to your values. What your instinct ‘tells you’ will depend a great deal on the importance you attach to different things, and the way you see the world. Hence two people with similar life experiences will have a very different gut feeling about whether something is right or wrong.
ASK YOURSELF: What do I tend to draw on most when making decisions – analysis or intuition? How could I develop my less used decision-making ‘muscle’? How could I better combine the two? Do I know what part my values play in my decision-making?
I often suggest one last tool to help people, especially groups, create the space to make good decisions. It involves breaking down the decisions and looking at them through four different lenses, Most business people are familiar with the SWOT model (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), which is usually used to address possible new business opportunities or the strategic choices of an organisation. Slightly adapted, it can also be used to interrogate potential choices around decisions, which is especially important in a VUCA world. Does your decision allow for review and an agile response if it turns out to have been wrong, or if circumstances change? Sometimes an inferior decision that can be changed might be better than a superior decision that can’t be.
Adapted SWOT model
Done rigorously such an adapted SWOT analysis can be a very effective tool for systematically evaluating different possible decisions. I know of one CEO of a FTSE 100 company who uses it all the time during discussions, to the point where his top team groan when he brings it up. They also, though, acknowledge its effectiveness. He says why stop using something just because we’re overfamiliar with it?
ASK YOURSELF: What methods, tools and tips do you use to enrich and deepen your decision-making. Do I always think through the consequences of my decisions? What happens if I have to change my decision?
In Part I we have looked at three elements of thinking: reflection, learning and deciding. While, in practice, these overlap and intermingle, we have teased them out as separate activities in order to explore them in detail and offer some insights – and practical suggestions – that should help you create space to think in a clearer, richer, deeper way.
There are three key lessons. First, you need to make the commitment, backed up with self-discipline, that better quality thinking is a priority for you – whether it involves reflection, learning or decision-making. Second, you need to examine whether there are any core pathogenic beliefs distorting how you approach the task of thinking, in its various forms. Once you have identified these you can challenge them and replace them with healthier, more realistic beliefs. Last, you have to set clear goals and clearly articulate the changes you intend to make to your behaviour around thinking – and hold yourself accountable for these.
High quality thinking is one of the two foundations of successful execution. The other is how we relate to, work with and get the best out of other people. So before we move to looking at Space to Do, let’s first examine how we can Create Space to Connect.
