It is a common fallacy to believe that the link between decisions and outcomes is causally direct. Good decisions lead to bad outcomes, and vice versa, all the time. But looking back and re-examining the circumstances of the decision is often regarded as an impediment to forward progress, and so the quality of decisions tends to be judged based on outcomes that are most readily apparent and not the processes behind the decision itself.
Experienced decision-makers are informed by more nuanced factors than those that are most neatly captured and correlated. It is the leader’s job to maintain a frame for decision-making that respects and embraces these aspects, rather than deferring responsibility and relying on those that are most quickly at hand.
DateNovember 20, 2014TitleHBR IdeaCast: Making Good DecisionsSegment00:14:06 – 00:16:24Ronald Howard:
…you can’t tell the quality of the decision you’re making by the outcome that will be produced. Or to put it in another way, you can’t tell by the outcome whether you’ve made a good decision. So you can have good decisions having bad outcomes or good outcomes, and bad decisions having good outcomes or bad outcomes. And it’s just a logical mistake to say “I got the good outcome, I must have made a good decision.” And yet, that’s what everybody thinks. In sports particularly, you’ll see a situation, say, in football, where the coach has decided to run for the two-point conversion. That’s at the end of the game, and he wants to be sure he gets two instead of one. And it doesn’t work. And the announcer says, “ah, that was a bad decision.” It’s completely illogical. You can’t tell whether it was a good decision by how it came out.
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Justin Fox — So do you judge the quality of the decision by the process that was used to get to it?
Ronald Howard — Exactly… The frame is the most important thing, and it’s the one that’s talked about the least… So that’s the most important thing: to get the frame right. Otherwise, you’re going to get the right answer to the wrong problem. Once you got the frame right, then it’s a matter of characterizing the alternatives you have. And maybe being creative about them, if you can be. Sometimes you can, sometimes you’re kind of stuck with what you’ve got.