Decision Quality Blog

With great care I draw your attention to an article by Lee Siegel called The Zero-Sacrifice Presidency.

Obama tells us that we can have quality, universal health care without increasing the deficit. He tells us that he intends to have the 9/11 detainees given a fair trial in a civilian court but assures us that the trials will end in convictions. He declares that he will wage war in Afghanistan, but pledges to start bringing the troops home in 18 months. And everybody nevertheless takes these contradictory, irreconcilable statements seriously, as they parse, analyze, scrutinize Obama’s every word for some kind of coherent meaning. The president is like the character Chance in the novel and movie Being There, whose every fatuous utterance was celebrated for its profundity.

Some of Obama’s defenders chastise his exasperated listeners for their inability to detect the president’s “complexity.” But a fantasy of universal popularity that panders to every conflicting interest simultaneously is not the same thing as “complexity.” It is complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I realize the strain it will put on our marriage, and that I know the effect it will have on our child, and that I am aware of the consequences of such an attempt if I don’t find a job, having spent so much money on moving and establishing myself in a new place. It is not complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I will be back next week, and with lots of money.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my caution is based on two points.  The first is that I was and largely still am an Obama supporter (though I fully admit my reasons may not be rational).  The second is that I made a promise to myself that I would stop writing political screeds. So why this?

I have been reading for the second time a book on decision making called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz. Harper Perennial 2005, Paperback, 304 pages, $4.81

It’s not my favorite book on decision making though it and he have certainly enjoyed a lot of attention for a “perfect for the times” message that can best me summed up by the B-Head for his book:  How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction.

Schwartz quotes a considerable amount of research to make the case that:

• An over-abundance of choices ultimately leads to confusion, poor decision making, and dissatisfaction with the decision once it is made.
• The more we are forced to justify our choice, the more dissatisfied we become with our choice.
• The reasons people give for making a choice are seldom the real reaons.
• The more people are forced to make trade-offs, the lower the satisfaction with the choice ultimately made.  Worse, the stress of making difficult trade-offs leads to low quality decision making.

Or to put it another way.  Many of us fancy that we are rational decision makers, or at least we can be on-demand when we must be.  The implication here is that we can, on an as needed basis, turn off our biology, our socialization, the mental short cuts, and the internal angels and demons we haul with us and simply add up the plusses and minuses or review the numbers and make the obvious right choice.  That’s a big ask.

That’s not to say that we can’t wrangle our emotions and engineers ourselves past many decision traps becuase we can.  It is to say that we don’t stop being human through the process. So if we believe Schwartz, and I do, many of us are left looking for paths through irreconcilable differences that often don’t exist, not becuase the facts support such a notion, but becuase we believe in Santa Claus.

I have never met the current or previous president but it seems plausible from afar that one of their many differences is that 43 didn’t appear to agonize and certainly had no visible regrets.  The same can be said for Cheney and Rumsfeld (though not Powell).  Critics of the three would say that one of the reasons that’s true is that they didn’t bother to consider alternatives that conflicted with what they had already decided to do.  If that is in fact an accurate accusation, it makes them no different than most of us (hard as that is for my liberal friends to hear).

Conversely, President Obama appears to pride himself on his thoughtful, inclusive, and complete decision making processes.  As a decision engineer, I heartily applaud his instincts and his practices.  But listening to his recent address at West Point about Afghanistan I am left wondering if Barry Schwartz doesn’t have his number: That at the end of the day, Mr. Obama hates making trade-offs and therefore makes others do it for him.

If that is true, it makes Obama like the rest of us as well.  It is also leadership sin number one: Forcing people below your pay grade to make the tough trade-offs you’re paid to make.

Decision making is a distinctly human activity: it is more than an instinctive “stimulus/response.”  Decisions aren’t found under a rock.  They are the result of cognitive processes that we can control.  They are what make us human. Because we are human, and because decision making is a distinctly human activity, decision making is subject to all manner of pitfalls, errors, traps and flaws. 

Most of us are not as good at decision making as we think we are or would like to be. There are many reasons why this is true.  Here are some.

• While we are experienced decision makers, we are not necessarily skilled in the sense that we have not thought about and internalized processes that lead reliably to high quality choices.
• We are much more easily influenced than we care to admit: by people, by word choices, by events, and by our own emotions.
• We are driven by psychological forces most of us don’t really understand: We were not evolved in modern industrialized, information-overloaded, choice-rich environments.
• We are wired to take mental short cuts.  It’s how we go through without having to make decisions about everything that we need to do.  Those mental short cuts can and do work against us causing us to make low quality decisions (again, far more often than we want to believe).
• We hate having to make trade-offs.
• We are evolved to adapt to our circumstances and to revisionist thinking,  We quickly learn to live with the consequences and outcomes of our decisions and retrofit our stories so that we can be right.

Despite everything we appear to have going against us, most of us manage to be highly functional and successful in life: We can say with confidence that we must be good decision makers judging by the outcomes we’re associated with.  Either that or we just got lucky (or a bit of both).

So why try to get better?  Why spend time and energy learning how to make higher quality decisions (and what does that mean anyway)?  After all, it’s not like we wake up in the morning thinking we need to be better decision makers?

We have over the years asked thousands of executives and leaders two simple and related questions:

• Are you a good decision maker (and how do you know)?
• Are “we” (meaning the group that person is part of) good decision makers?

As you might expect, the most frequently occurring answer to the first question is, “It depends.”  The answer to the second question is most consistently, “No.”

Why all this matters can be summed up in an oft quoted statistic from a now-retired professor named Paul Nutt who after years of research concluded that more than 50% of all decisions in business are unsuccessful.  Some of us think he’s a wild-eyed optimist.

Why Decisions Fail

Paul C Nutt. Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2002, Paperback, 332 pages, $12.91

While the dynamics of making decisions by yourself and making decisions with other people are different in many ways, they are similar in many ways as well.  Particularly where the decision is complicated—meaning difficult trade-offs, lack of clarity about the real problem, lots of uncertainty, long feedback loops, significant consequences associated with the outcomes—we can increase our confidence that we’re making a high quality choice by improving the quality of the decision process we use.  Steps that lead to decision quality include the following:

• Take time to explore the problem.  Words matter.  You’ll get new insights about the problem and later see a better set of alternatives by taking care in how you frame the problem.
• Give yourself good alternatives.  As consumers we usually face way too many choices.  In that case, quality may come from limiting alternatives.  In business, often the opposite is true: We rush to solution.  So time spent thinking about alternatives THE RIGHT WAY is important.
• Be smart about how you gather information.  As is true about choices, it is possible to have too much and too little information . . . and in the end it is not possible to know everything you might like to know.  Focus your information on gathering on what is important.  Focus on what could go wrong and what that means to your decision.
• Identify clear values and not too many of them.  Too many trade-offs is as problematic as too many choices and too much information.  The opposite is also true.

As you would expect, there are many ways to go about building quality into each of those steps.  Fortunately, for most decisions, the principles, methods, and tools you need are simple, easy to understand and master, and easy to use in both individual and group decision settings.

For more on making quality decisions visit these links: