Make The Right Decision...Or Make The Decision Right?

Much of my work as a coach involves helping people wrestle with an important decision. Some of these decisions feel particularly big because they involve selecting one option to the exclusion of all others when the cost of being "wrong" can be substantial: If I'm at a crossroads in my career, which path should I follow? If I'm considering job offers, which one should I accept? If I'm being asked to relocate, should I move to a new city or stay put?

And while I've written before on the conditions that support good decision-making and firmly believe that we can improve the quality of our decisions by following those guidelines, I'm also reminded of a comment made by Scott McNealy--a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years--during a lecture I attended while I was in business school at Stanford: He was asked how he made decisions and responded by saying (I'm paraphrasing, but his point was crystal clear):

It's important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about "making the right decision" and much more time and energy insuring that any decision I make turns out right.

That comment has stuck with me for over a decade and continues to influence me today. Before we make any decision--particularly one that will be difficult to undo--we're understandably anxious and focused on identifying the "best" option because of the risk of being "wrong." But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the importance of the moment of choice itself and lose sight of the importance of everything that follows. Merely selecting the "best" option doesn't guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn't doom us to failure or unhappiness. It's what happens next (and in the days, months and years that follow) that ultimately determines whether a given decision was "right."

Another aspect of this dynamic is that our focus on making the "right" decision can easily lead to paralysis, because the options we're choosing among are so difficult to rank in the first place. How can we possibly determine in advance what career path will be "best," or what job offer we should accept, or whether we should move across the country or stay put? Obviously, we can't--there are far too many variables and little or no data to work with. But the more we yearn for an objective algorithm to rank our options and make the decision for us, the more we distance ourselves from the subjective factors--our intuition, our emotions, our gut--that will ultimately pull us in one direction or another. And so we get stuck, waiting for a sign--something--to point the way.

I believe the path to getting unstuck when faced with a daunting, possibly paralyzing decision is embedded in McNealy's comment, and it involves a fundamental re-orientation of our mindset: Focusing on the choice minimizes the effort that will inevitably be required to make any option succeed and diminishes our sense of agency and ownership. In contrast, focusing on the effort that will be required not only helps us see the means by which any choice might succeed, it also restores our sense of agency and reminds us that while randomness plays a role in every outcome, our locus of control resides in our day-to-day activities more than in our one-time decisions.

So while I certainly support using any available data to rank our options in some rough sense, ultimately we're best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving foward by 1) paying close attention to the feelings and emotions that accompany the decision we're facing, 2) assessing how motivated we are to work toward the success of any given option, and 3) recognizing that no matter what option we choose, our efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to our choice.

Addendum: My thinking on this topic has been heavily influence by GSB professor Baba Shiv, an expert in the neuroscience of decision-making:

A good decision is one in which the decision maker is happy with the decision and will stay committed to the decision, Shiv says. [My emphasis] And that’s where emotions come in: They’re mental shortcuts that help us resolve trade-off conflicts and...happily commit to a decision. "When you feel a trade-off conflict, it just behooves you to focus on your gut."

And furthermore: Rick Lane's comment prompted some further thinking on the process of getting "unstuck," which I'll quote from my response to him: I'm all too aware that when we're deeply stuck and paralyzed by a decision, we need something more than a conceptual understanding of decision-making to get us moving again. I return to the power of emotion, and I think that the combined hope for a better future and the pain of our present "stuckness" must overcome the combined fear that we'll make the wrong choice and the pain that often accompanies tough choices, particularly when a choice will hurt or disappoint someone.

Photo by Conor Ogle. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Comments

[Rick Lane]

Great advice especially as you pointed out for those decisions that have us "stuck" and paralyzed. You need to get your head and your heart involved in these type of decisions and don't look back.

Thanks

[edbatista]

Thanks, Rick. That interplay between head and heart is precisely the focus of Baba Shiv's research. The role of emotions in reasoning is also why I've found Antonio Damasio's work so compelling. And yet I'm all too aware that when we're deeply stuck and paralyzed by a decision, we need something more than a conceptual understanding of decision-making to get us moving again. I return to the power of emotion, and I think that the combined hope for a better future and the pain of our present "stuckness" must overcome the combined fear that we'll make the wrong choice and the pain that often accompanies tough choices, particularly when a choice will hurt or disappoint someone.