Rowan's Future of Choice

My goal is to make one decision per year

Dennis W. Bakke, the co-founder of energy company AES, believes executives should defer nearly all decisions to employees. Of course, many shareholders blame him for a 92% drop in value between 2000 and 2002 ($70 to $5). But look what has happened since.

"With the exception of those required by law to be made by top executives, all other decisions, including those with major financial implications, should be delegated to team members who are closest to the matter under consideration.

Link. Learn about his new book at his site. Other link. Chart.

Perhaps the biggest decision we can make

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Seeking to disconfirm our views

In Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, Professor Michael Roberto writes about the tragedy on Mount Everest on May 10, 1996:

"...leaders must seek out information that disconfirms their existing views, and they should discourage subordinates from hiding bad news. Leaders also must take great care to separate facts from assumptions, and they must encourage everyone to test critical assumptions vigorously to root out overly optimistic projections."

Link, Photo 

Screwing our courage to the changing point

I have written several times that a decision is a commitment to change. (Link to earlier post.)

Seth Godin wrote here about the importance of external levers for affecting change. Ann Michael, in her wonderful blog that I just discovered, added more to Seth's argument, here. I encourage you to read both.

While I concede external levers have a time and place, I believe organizational change begins with decisions we make about our "internal" situation and current mindset. This is because that is ultimately where change has to occur. With this grounding, I also believe that almost anything is possible, given time.

Leaders have used external pressure to affect organizational change for many years and with limited success. They have hired outsiders to insert innovation or replace long term employees; they have orchestrated M&A's to slough off or combine units; they have lobbied to change the regulatory or structural rules to their advantage.

The track record for each of these tactics is fair-to-poor. Few of them create a positive legacy. Only rarely are they customer or stakeholder focused. None strengthen or invest in employees and their families and communities. Most are fleeting and soon forgotten. And most importantly, few lessons are ever learned and applied.

Organizations and people have the power to change within them. Besides, if we don't believe in our own capacity to change, what's the point?

Unconscious power. So it goes.

We believe that power leads not to a conscious decision to ignore other individuals' perspectives, but rather to a psychological state that makes perspective taking less likely.

Thanks to The Dragon Slayer's Guide to Life for digging this up at the Association for Psychological Science.

Conflict is 'designed' into our brains

"Moral decision making is based on our emotional reaction to situations as much as it is to any kind of rational thought..."

We are just built that way.

ScientificAmerican.com story; drawing credit

Should you supersize your decisions?

Nearly all of our decisions are grounded in the linear passage of time. Picture in your mind the modern history time line you were taught in school. Most of us also have personal and work time lines, and their associated refrigerator calendars, post-it reminders, and alarms.

Time is an essential element of a decision. Sometimes, it is the only pressure we have: we simply run out of it.

What if 'size' is just as essential to a decision?

The picture on the left is a snippet from a flash animation by Nikon. It shows the stunning range and uncertainty associated with the simple topic we call "size." Think about it: 

Don't we prefer problems we can 'get our arms around'?

We dismiss 'nit-pickers' for obsessing in the details and like to step back and 'see the forest for the trees.'

'Don't sweat the small stuff.'

Size may matter more than we give it credit. Maybe we should chunk large decisions into pieces. Build things in stages. Get the details right.

Click here and choose full screen or normal mode to watch this short flash animation. Use your mouse scroll to fly across the size scale. This is really cool.
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Nikon's universcale web site; Thanks to the Naib at The Sietch Blog for pointing me to this.

When the morning light comes streaming in, we'll get up and do it again

I am reminded by something Theodore Roosevelt said that decision-making is both a team and a contact 'sport.'  An authentic decider (by my reckoning) must coach and play the entire bloody game, then get up and do it again.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt; Photo credit; title credit from The Pretender by Jackson Browne

Where all the blog posts are above average

Something I wrote was voted "best post of the week." It is here. Woo Woo! Thanks very much to Political Calculations for the recognition, and to Laura for using my post in her Carnival of Courage.