Article archive / October 2022
Originally published: . Volume 13, No. 10. Source pages: 2.
The first thing you need to do to make a good decision is to get your arms around a good problem. It needs to be an excellent, worthy problem, not some lame issue or minutia. If it’s something lame, try what works for some people – let it sit at the bottom of your in-basket or sink in your email, delegate to a secretary, an intern, or a wife if you’re lucky enough to have one and she hasn’t read I Feel Guilty When I Say No.
The reason you should only focus on a good, worthy problem, despite the American need to affiliate and establish superiority, is because it is going to be expensive in time, energy, and lost productivity, especially if you solve it correctly. Take for instance the situation with ADA accommodations for Dr. Gormanous at the State Board. It took oodles of dollars to come around to a reasonable compromise, surely an unnecessary expense for both sides.
So, first make sure you have a really good problem, supported by some actual evidence. Failing that, check with a kindergartner since they are good at the question “Why?”
Which brings me to my second point. It is critical that you figure out exactly what issue you are trying to solve, so you don’t wind up working on the wrong problem or trying to solve a symptom of it. This thing that happens to a lot of us – solving symptoms of problems– is so common a mistake that we have a name for it – the medical model. Much of medicine has developed excellence for treating symptoms. We even name diseases by their symptoms, which seems to confuse people. In this category is also the problem that Daniel Kahneman unfortunately named WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) which in English means that there is always invisible stuff and so then fertile ground for unintended consequences and poor results.
A third thing you should remember when solving complex problems is to refuse vigorously to allow your team to grow larger than five or so people. Government and associations don’t seem to be concerned about this. But if you are going to have any hope of a high-functioning team, this is critical. If you are unlucky enough to be assigned a large group and told to manage some sort of problem-solving process, and there is absolutely no way you can get out of it, then you must have a facilitator, and everybody must be assessed for cognitive style, conflict style, leadership style, and decision- making skill. My advice is to call in sick.
The fourth thing to remember is to avoid compromise and other shortcuts. Compromise has somehow gotten unwarranted positive reviews, probably because most people don’t know that often compromise is only a bad solution in disguise. Another bad idea is majority rule voting, which usually means it was a poor decision. Probably nobody knew what else to do, people were all worn out, blood sugar was tanking, it was time for lunch, or traffic was picking up. Compromise and majority rule result in halfway, mediocre decisions that only a percentage find fully acceptable.
Perhaps one of the worse things about bad solutions is that they lull people into thinking that they actually have an adequate solution, when they don’t. People stop searching for the best idea, or even just a better one. Bad decisions clutter our social and political landscape, pile up in all the corners, and dangerously frame and anchor future decisions.
Which brings me to a final point. Failure is a good thing. Knowing when to throw in the towel, when to call it quits, when to yell Uncle, and when discretion is the better part of valor, is a valuable but rare trait.
Failure is one of the best ways to get rid of stuff that isn’t working. It is human nature for us to kick and scream when we lose something, even if what we’re losing isn’t working in the first place. Once invested, our judgment goes out the window. No new evidence, statistics, no new frame–nothing works to press our reset button. Bad decisions morph and return like flesh-eating zombies that just won’t die.
Oh, and one last idea. Try to keep the attorneys out of it.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.