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The Importance of Making the Call
You can’t move an organization forward if you don’t make decisions. Work is just one decision after another. You have to decide about pricing, market segmentation, branding. I mean, you just have to make one decision after another. There are lots of types of decisions in this world. To me, a hard call has got two qualities. It has to be made quickly, and you don’t have enough information. People hate making hard calls because they may go south. You may have made a mistake. And when you have put your name with the decision and then it bombs, your name’s on it. And nobody wants to be exposed to failure because, generally, people want to keep their jobs. And so we hedge our bets so that we’re not assigned to the bet that failed, and that’s human nature.
But once you’ve failed a few times in business and life goes on, you realize, “Oh, okay. That’s what actually, that’s how it all goes.” I will make a mistake, and life will generally go on. And I’ll be able to say to my team, “Look. We did that once. It didn’t work. I own it. This is what I’ve learned.” And the respect you get for saying, “I made that mistake. I own it. This is what we learned” is unbelievable. Edge is the personality trait or the competency of being able to make a yes or no decision. You have to develop this. Otherwise, you will get a reputation for a person who cannot be a leader. There’s a lot of disagreement about what leadership actually is, but I would say the one that probably overlaps with everybody is this ability to finally make a decision and make it quickly. And if you’ve ever worked for someone who could not make a yes or no decision, you know the particular pain it causes in an organization. If somebody waffles and just can’t commit to something.
Now, there is an incredible benefit to sometimes wallowing in a decision before you make it, hearing from all different people, people who disagree. Sometimes when I’m managing a team, I say, “This is what I’m seeing. What am I not seeing?” I want to get all the data. I want to hear all the opinions. And then, however, you must actually make the call.
The 10-10-10 System
Let’s be clear on what gut is. Gut is pattern recognition. Okay? I’ve seen this pattern before. I know I’ve seen these dots. Boom. Boom. Boom. The next dot’s going to be there. But a lot of decisions you make, there’s no pattern. This day and age, you’re making decisions with no pattern all the time. Okay? And so your dots of your pattern are sort of random. Gut is fine, but I always say don’t ever use it alone. You have to check your gut. Use a decision-making system along with it.
There are so many to choose from. I happen to like 10-10-10 as a decision making system because I invented it. Okay? But I want to just say, it’s not the only one. And with 10-10-10, it’s very simple. You take your decision. You write down what your options are. We can do A. We can do B. We can do C. And then you take each one of those options and you consider their consequences in the immediate future, that’s ten minutes. The foreseeable future, that’s ten months. These are directional. And the future that you would like to build, that’s ten years. And you build a grid and you fill in all the data, and then you say, “Given what we want, what our values are as an organization, what our goals are as an organization, which one of these options is the right one?”
One of the reasons I like this tool is because you can do it in a group and people can say, “Yes, but,” they can push back. But you’ve got all that data there, and then you grok it. You take the data and you take it apart and you study it and you push back on the assumptions that made somebody say it. Yeah. You’re saying in ten months that’s going to happen, but I want to push back on that assumption. I don’t think that’s going to happen. And in this way, it’s all out on the table. Everybody’s talked about it so that when the team makes the decision or the leader makes the decision, everyone knows why and how it was made.
Decision Trees
Another very good tool, one of the classic decision-making systems, decision trees. It’s mainly nodes and branches. So you start off with a node that says here’s the decision we’re making, and then the original branches have all the options. And then off of those branches are all sub branches that identify all the possible eventualities. This is very good when you’re making a decision that involves financial implications. “Okay. We go with option A. This thing happens. The implications are two million dollars. This thing happens. The implications are three million dollars.” And you plot it out looking at every possible optionality. I mean, some decision trees are massive, and we used to make them by hand in the old days. But now, decision trees are completely digitized. You can get decision tree software, put in all your data, and it actually, AI is really pushing it forward in this way. The one thing I would say about decision trees, decision trees typically take some training on how to build them, but you can get that training, and I would recommend that you do.