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Transcript
Hello, this is Thomas Harris. I want to welcome you to the podcast.
 Hello, welcome to the podcast. My name is Thomas Harris and I’m glad you’re here.
The past episodes, we’ve been going over Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Temptations of a CEO and applying those temptations to any leader because even though he, the title focuses on CEO, those temptations really can affect anybody.
So we’ve talked about number one which was putting status of results, number two, popularity over accountability, and today is number three. And this is what temptation number three is: It’s choosing certainty over clarity.
And of course, clarity is important for you as a leader and for your team or your organization because clarity lets people know which direction to go. It gives purpose in what you’re doing.
And it also is a guide for decision-making or choices you make or actions you make. Because if you know what direction you’re going, then you can know if certain decisions help you move toward it or not. If this action moves me toward the goal or not. So clarity is important, but sometimes people can hold off or leaders can hold off on clarity because they want certainty.
So what does that mean?
Sometimes leaders want to be 100% certain that a decision or direction is the right way before making the decision. They may fear making a mistake or going the wrong way or just messing things up. Because sometimes things have consequences.
So you want to make the best decision possible. And so they want to make sure 100% are as close as they can that the decision they’re making is the right decision.
So for us to go over this, let’s look at decision-making as a whole.
Decision-making is probability
One aspect of decision-making that’s important to see is what Annie Duke says in her book, Thinking in Bets, which is that all decision-making really is probability.
Think of it like poker. You have certain cards in your hand and you play, Texas Hold’em, you play with the cards in your hand and the cards on the table and you’re betting that you have the best hand.
Now you can start off with a pocket aces, the best hand you can get and still lose. You can start off with two and seven, the worst hand and still win.
In fact, when I played a few years ago, I was playing at the table of people and the person beside of me had put down four of a kind Jacks. It was basically guaranteed. He was going to win because that’s a rare hand to get. He thought he was going to win. I think he went all in with it.
But then the person beside him put down his cards and he had four kings. Something that like rarely happens. So even though sometimes you think you have a winning hand, you can still lose sometimes.
Decisions are like this.
You don’t always know all the information. You’re not going to get all the information. Circumstances change, so on. What you do is with the cards in your hand, you make the best decision possible. Sometimes it turns out well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
You can make a good decision and it turn out good, and it can turn out bad as well. You can make a bad decision, and sometimes it turns out bad like it probably will, but sometimes it turns out good.
You may know someone who made a really poor decision, whether an investment or some dumb risk, and it just happened to turn out well for them for whatever reason. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it again.
And just because you make a, just because something turns out poorly from a decision, doesn’t necessarily mean it was a bad decision you made.
We need to adjust how we judge decisions
Sometimes we judge decisions based on the outcome and then base our actions based on the outcome when really we need to make sure we judge decisions by the process we used and the information we had at the time.
To summarize that real fast, to make sure I was clear, decision making is probability. Kind of like poker, you can play the best hand, you play the best you can, but sometimes you will still lose.
Good decisions can sometimes turn out poorly, bad decisions can sometimes turn out well. You make the best decision you can, and you judge decisions based on the process used and the information you had or that your team member had, not just on the outcome.
So when we think about these things, when it comes to certainty over clarity, is that you’re not going to be certain that mistakes are going to happen and that the best thing to do is just to learn from those mistakes so you can keep making better decisions.
Not deciding is a decision
The problem is that when you don’t make a decision, when you try to wait for all the information, you’re basically making a decision to do nothing. And sometimes that can be worse than quote-unquote making a bad decision. You are choosing to do nothing about it.
And if there’s not clarity, then you’re choosing not to give people clarity and people going in different directions. That’s a choice you’re making by not deciding.
How do you know when to decide? Well, it kind of depends. You really need to look at the cost of waiting. Some decisions aren’t worth gathering more information. If you can, with a lot of decisions, you want to take the time to gather information. I’m not saying don’t, but there’s a point where a decision needs to be made when the cost of waiting is worse than gathering information, if I said that correctly.
When that’s time, you need to make a decision. You can make a decision to wait in certain circumstances, but those decisions need to be intentional, not because of fear.
Many decisions don’t have to be permanent
And truth is, decisions don’t have to be permanent. You can make short-term decisions and come like one decision here, a month later you check it and do the next decision, do it in increments, or you can make a decision and then come back in a few weeks and look at the decision, look at the new information you made, and then pivot the way you need to go.
Sometimes we, sometimes people think that these decisions are these huge things that have to stay that way, and some may be, but in general, you can adjust decisions as you go as new information comes in. And if it founds out you quote unquote made a bad decision, well, now you know you’ve got more information and then you can adjust accordingly. And the next time you know how to do the decision differently.
And a lot of this goes back to the growth mindset because if you have the right perspective about it and the right perspective of mistakes, you don’t see being wrong as this horrible thing against you. You just see it as a tool to learn from. As long as you’re doing your due diligence, gathering the information that you can, when you’re able to.
When you choose, you know it might be wrong because it’s all probability. You’re not going to have all the information, but you know you can learn from it. And then you know there’s things you can do to help, you know, like checking later, checking information as you go along, whatever steps you take to help make sure things don’t go forward a long way in the wrong way.
People need clarity. It’s hard to do one’s job without clarity. And, we aren’t going to know all the information. We’re not going to know everything about the decision. It’s going to be 100% perfect.
Sometimes we have to make decisions with limited information because the decision needs to be made. Make the best decision possible, move forward. You can check it later. You can do things like premortems where you see the things that could go wrong and prepare for those potential pitfalls, but make the decision and move forward.
I hope this helps. I’ll see you in temptation number four.
