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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
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Hello, everyone, we have a special announcement today. And we are shifting the focus of this podcast on to decision making for a while, you can consider it the changing of seasons. Now this format is going to change a little bit, but you can expect the same expert insights from our guests and some of my solo casts where I'm going to dive deeper into the strategies and tactics around making great decisions. So on this episode, why decision making it's the most important skill for leaders? Three Reasons to prioritize it right now. And finally, the critical questions to ask yourself when decision making so I'm gonna roll the music, and then we'll get into Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life need to. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Alright, let's dive into the two strings of thought that highlight why decision making is important. First, the best leaders make the best decisions. Alright, so I want you to think back on every leader that you've ever studied, read about and worked with, doesn't matter. Right? Every last one of them is known because they made great decisions, right decisions around hiring around firing around what to focus on. There are a few that we study for their poor decisions. But we're often studying those leaders for the decision that they made, not like how they are perceived as a leader. Right? Steve Jobs is well known for not not being the friendliest of folk at times. But he's very well respected as being this leader that a lot of people look up to, because he made a lot of great decisions. Right? The ones that people were statues, the ones that are truly remembered, like they made great decisions. Now, this isn't the neglect, the whole leaders are remembered by how they made you feel argument, but a leader who you respect, but continuously fails to accomplish their mission, right isn't a great leader. Like they can't help everyone. It doesn't matter how good you feel if you've lost your job. And so I think it's so critically important. Next train of thought, though, is that great strategy comes from great decisions, like strategy is the art of decision making. And so if you want to be a fantastic strategist, you need to know where to say yes, and and what to say no to. And so we can look at the root of the word and right decision is D, which comes from off, then then qaderi probably saying that wrong, but it means to cut. So deciding is to cut off all of the options that you're not selecting. And it's important you choose right? Because you're going to find that it's often impossible to get back what you have severed from right. But so let's get in some of the reasons that you should be prioritizing decision making in your repertoire right now. First, there's a noise problem, right? We're all faced with this endless barrage of media. And everywhere you look, there is something trying to capture your attention, like the sheer volume of content has trained our attention spans to just weekend. So the bar has been raised for what's required in order to keep our focus and decision making this means it becomes more difficult to kind of parse out the important information and insights from the rest. And let's face it, right these days, everyone has an opinion. The problem is that most people are treating their opinions like convictions, people hear something on the news. And they form an opinion and they are willing to die on that hill defending it. And everyone does this to like some extent. But with better awareness, we can see when we're committing this error and notice when others are starting to do the same. And so by getting good at the process of decision making, we can actually break through the noise and find the critical information much faster. And then we can better put that information to work helping us make the best decisions for our current situation. Right, we remove a lot of those biases. Number two, the stakes are raised, the modern world is moving fast. And because of this, a poor decision is a lot harder to come back from than probably ever before. And worse is that you're faced with decisions at a much larger volume than before because of that speed. And so when you add in the fact that thanks to social media, everyone can learn about your poor decisions quickly tainting your reputation. It's never been more important to get good at decision making, or your team's livelihoods are on the line. They are counting on you as the leader to keep them safe. And we're blessed as a modern society with the ability to be ethical. Write long ago survival was the priority nothing else mattered today, there's a good chance that you're gonna survive without a lot of effort. So this means we have the luxury of being ethic Go also means that there's another layer of variables to stack on to your decision making, right? We now that we can be more ethical, we need to be more ethical, because it's become an expectation. And we should with good reason, right? If you can do good things and be ethical, do it please. Number three, competition for resources with economic and environmental constraints. Yeah, these continuous demands from the market, our decisions are a lot harder to make, right? We don't have an abundance of resources to make unlimited decisions. So we got to be very deliberate in every choice that we make. Your competitors are targeting the same audience, they're reaching out to the same investors, and they're fighting for space on the same shelves and platforms, making a good decision here is critical to keeping your business growing. Okay, so with those reasons, now, I want to talk some of the critical questions that you should be asking yourself to, to ensure you're doing the right things within the decision making process. Right, and we're going to cover this a lot more. In future episodes, I've got the four skills that you should be using to make great decisions. We've got a bunch of processes for how to actually flow through a decision from learning of a problem to actually having a great solution at the end. But first, these are some questions that you need to ask number one is the time spent making this decision worth the output of the decision. Nothing is worse than committing time, like deliberating over a decision only to realize that it was inconsequential. Everyone knows that person who left blows a problem out of proportion, because it's like they're hardwired for it. These people stress over a challenge. And they're committing resources and brainpower when if they just asked this question, right, that is this time spent making the decision worth the output of the decision, then they'd have realized that decision probably didn't need to be made. Right now the waste of time, the resources put us further behind. And the next decision has been made more difficult. Some decisions have no or limited consequences, right. These can be made with way less consideration than those with those with bigger consequences. That sounds common central facts are a great example, Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to Shell shareholders back in 1997. And he differentiated type one decisions from type two. And you can also view these as doors, right? It's kind of the how I would envision them. A type one decision is a one way door, you can't easily reverse that decision type two decisions can be reversed, you go back through that door. So less time should be spent deliberating and more time taking action to see if it works if this is a type two door. So if a decision is reversible, make it fast. Right, there's also the challenge of understanding the outcome of decisions, separate from the output, or the output might be that the team is unblocked on tasks and can drive forward, the outcome is that we have achieved our goal. So outcomes are not always visible immediately. And this is why it's important to reflect on decisions and ensure that we're not mislabeling our outputs as outcomes. And then lastly, for this one, there are times when a decision must be made. But the return on the decision is minimal, at the time spent deciding should be proportional to the perceived outcome. And number two, are we clear enough on the problem that we can progress? So we'll cover this further, when we start talking about like, the skill of acclimating to all the data and everything within the decision making process. But it's something to continuously ask during the decision making process. If you don't know where you are, is impossible to create a map for where to go. But even if you believe you know, the problem, sometimes you're actually looking at a symptom rather than the cause. And so the problem may shift as you uncover more information in your process of decision making. And so you have to keep asking this question. The narrower your focus, the more you can maximize impact. So get as specific and tightly focused on the problem as you can you need to think, right, like these web pages are underperforming verse, our website is underperforming. And number three, how will we measure success to know if our decision was right?
It is commonly known in business that you can't improve what you don't measure. But I'd argue there's another step, and it's that you can't measure what you don't define. The scientific method is the gold standard for launching a test. And a critical piece is in development of hypothesis to determine if your assumptions and theories are correct. So with decision making, we need to do the same thing but mapping out how we'll know if our choice was correct. The man metrics should defer per decision and provide you with the most accuracy and to knowing if your decision was good, right. As humans, we have a need to measure progress in decision making. Consider measure quality as well. We often move away from measurements like happiness and satisfaction, or we tried to quantify them. The immeasurable items are important because you can make a decision and still feel terrible after, right, it's often because he neglected to consider feelings in the decision. And while we don't want to think 100% Emotionally, we can't only use logic and expect to make great decisions all the time. Many of our decisions involve other people who are emotional creatures. And so sometimes missing out on a 10% revenue gain is okay, if the team is excited and motivated to take on what's next rather than burnout. So when making the decision, consider the measurable and immeasurable variables that will tell you if your decision was right. And then finally, number four, how will I guarantee I learned something from this decision, we make countless decisions every day. And not each has a tremendous consequences. But there's something we can learn from each. And some of this happens without conscious thought. Like, for example, brushing your teeth is a habit for most people, you've learned that if you brush your teeth, it'll protect your teeth for tomorrow. Now, you don't have to think about that decision, you just execute. You learn that this is the right decision. And you can make it time and time again without thought. It said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. But I believe it's doing the same thing and expecting a different result when you know there are other options available. And when we're conscious of the fact that we can make a decision to change anything in our lives, we either fall into insanity or carry the golden ticket to set us free. Once you have that realization, it's much easier to think through a decision at hand. Because that awareness enables you to recall the outcome of the decisions. And so being deliberate and asking this critical question will improve the chances of deciding better or faster for the next time. Okay, lots of information that I just packed into a short episode. We're going to have some guests coming on where we're going to explore decisions that they had to make in order to get to where they are now business leaders, Olympians, people at the top of their game. And we're going to ask all of our questions kind of figure out what we can learn from their decisions, right, we get the gift of going second, and I think that's something powerful that everyone should be taken advantage of. So that does it for today's episode. Stay tuned for more on decision making and we very much appreciate your listenership. Thanks for listening to today's episode, if you want to leave a review, awesome, but I would recommend you head over to LinkedIn. Connect with me. Join the conversation there. You find my profile in the show notes and I look forward to connecting with you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai