How to tackle your decisions

Every entrepreneur makes tough calls—it comes with the job. And the toughest calls come in the gray areas—situations where you and your team have worked hard to gather the facts and done the best analysis you can, but you still don’t know what to do. It’s easy to become paralyzed in the face of such challenges. Yet as a leader, you have to make a decision and move forward. Your judgment becomes critical.

Judgment is hard to define. It is a fusion of your thinking, feelings, experience, imagination, and character. But five practical questions can improve your odds of making sound judgments, even when the data is incomplete or unclear, opinions are divided, and the answers are far from obvious.

Where do these questions come from? Over many centuries and across many cultures, they have emerged as men and women with serious responsibilities have struggled with difficult problems. They express the insights of the most penetrating minds and compassionate spirits of human history. I have relied on them for years, in teaching MBA candidates and counseling executives, and I believe that they can help you, your team, and your organization navigate the grayest of gray areas.

This article explains the five questions and illustrates them with a disguised case study involving a manager who must decide what to do about a persistently underperforming employee who has failed to respond to suggestions for improvement. He deserves a bad review, if not dismissal, but higher-ups at the company want to overlook his failings.

How should the manager approach this situation? Not by following her gut instinct. Not by simply falling into line. Instead, she needs to systematically work through the five questions:

What are the net, net consequences of all my options?
What are my core obligations?
What will work in the world as it is?
Who are we?
What can I live with?

To grapple with these questions, you must rely on the best information and expertise available. But in the end you have to answer them for yourself. With gray-area decisions, you can never be certain you’ve made the right call. But if you follow this process, you’ll know that you worked on the problem in the right way—not just as a good manager but as a thoughtful human being.

Net, Net Consequences

The first question asks you to thoroughly and analytically consider every course of action available to you, along with the full, real-world, human consequences of each. Gray-area problems are rarely resolved in a flash of intuitive brilliance from one person; as a very successful CEO told me, “The lonely leader on Olympus is really a bad model.” So your job is to put aside your initial assumption about what you shoulddo, gather a group of trusted advisers and experts, and ask yourself and them, “Whatcould we do? And who will be hurt or helped, short-term and long-term, by each option?”

Don’t confuse this with cost-benefit analysis, or focus solely on what you can count or price. Of course, you should get the best data you can and apply the relevant frameworks. But gray-area problems require you to think more broadly, deeply, concretely, imaginatively, and objectively about the full impact of your choices. In the words of the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi, “It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and to eliminate what is harmful.”

In today’s complex, fluid, interdependent world, none of us can predict the future with total accuracy. And it’s sometimes hard to think clearly about gray-area issues. What’s important is taking the time to open your mind, assemble the right team, and analyze your options through a humanist lens. You might sketch out a rough decision tree, listing all potential moves and all probable outcomes, or designate certain people to act as devil’s advocates to find holes in your thinking and prevent you from rushing to conclusions or succumbing to groupthink.

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Source: Harvard business review