The vast majority of successful companies out there are encouraging their employees and leaders to have a bias for action.
In other words, they prefer you to act instead of staying stuck in indecision limbo.
Some go even further and elevate bias for action as a key leadership principle, like Amazon, where action and calculated risks usually win over planning and waiting.
So, no wonder why this bias for action is synonymous with success in the enterprise world. And it is undoubtedly a life saver as no one has the time to ponder every little thing that comes their way.
That’s fine for the majority of minor decisions that leaders must make daily. They can even rely on their gut instinct for these. After all, most of these decisions are reversible, and you can always adjust things as the outcome of your actions becomes real.
Yet, for more complex situations, there’s nothing better than stepping back, weighing options, and considering the different scenarios.
The last thing you need is to let intuition guide you in these circumstances. Sadly, the more successful leaders have been, the more prone to gut-level decisions they are, even on complex issues.
It leads to an inaccurate understanding of the situations at hand and a higher risk of falling prey to other biases. It feeds the vicious cycle of only considering new information that reinforces existing beliefs rather than objectively looking at the whole dataset.
So, how do you fight your intuition when you’re about to make decisions on complex issues?
Here are a few rules I have applied with decent success:
Clearly define the problem statement
I’ve been in too many situations where a leader and his group tried to solve an issue. Still, they were not aligned on the exact definition of the challenge. So, make sure you spend enough time framing the problem for your group and have everyone aligned on what’s at stake and the consequences.
Beware of Group Consensus
Many decisions tend to be made by groups as they seem to represent diverse points of view. The issue is that, even if you correctly state the problem, once a consensus starts to take shape, it has its momentum. Group wisdom takes over, and getting people’s honest perspectives is getting harder.
Gather individual inputs instead
Before you consider setting a group meeting to solve a complex challenge, collect your stakeholders’ views on the problem at hand independently. Collate their answers and group them into agreement and divergence areas.
Use your group meeting to address the divergences
You’ll know even before your group meeting where the consensus is. But what matters is for you to explore the areas of divergence between the stakeholders. That’s the key to any great decision: understanding why well-informed individuals might have diverging views on an issue. Go to the roots of such divergences, educate and get educated about these.
Then, and only then, you can make your decision. There will have been enough dialog with your stakeholders for the group to reasonably support such a decision.
Establishing that discipline when facing complex situations will help you avoid the intuition trap and act decisively.
Want to keep exploring the vast topic of decision-making for leaders? You will find many more practical ideas in my latest book “Powerful Decisions.”