Adaptive Strategies Blog

More about the eight skills of the Prepared Mind.

In the past two weeks I’ve touched on the skills of Challenging and Observing. Here’s another skill you need to consider – the skill of deciding

Why do you get paid? Let me be blunt – if it’s not because you have responsibility for making or influencing decisions at your organization, then your job is in big trouble.

It’s easy to outsource “transaction stuff” (“Why yes, I’ll be happy to take your order for …”) and it’s even easy to outsource important “knowledge stuff” (Was your recent x-ray read by a radiologist in your hospital or in another country?) However, decisions and decision making stays close to home – this act of management is too important to outsource (that said, has your organization outsourced key decisions to your local band of consultants? But that’s another story.).

Get it? You want to be in a position that accepts the risk (and rewards) of decision making.

So where does the concept of having a Prepared Mind come into play? Well, there are plenty of books that delve into the mechanics and processes of good decision making. They are important, but not enough. If you are going to be prepared for your future, and make good decisions that will bring your organization into the future, you need to consider (as Peter Drucker put it many years ago) the “futurity of present decisions.” In other words, you need to think about the intended and unintended consequences of today’s decisions. Want a couple of examples? Try these:

• DDT (easier to say than dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) was the very first modern pesticide and was widely used in crop protection and for the eradication of malaria-bearing mosquitoes in the 1940s and 1950s. The Swiss inventor was even awarded the Nobel Prize “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” Unfortunately DDT has toxic side effects and caused the death of fish and birds, so it was banned in many countries in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the banning lead to a resurgence of malaria in many tropical countries by the end of the 20th century. Was the widespread use of DDT a good decision? Was the wholesale banning of DDT a good decision? There may have been a better middle ground if scientists and politicians had looked into the future.
• Let’s look at today’s dire circumstances with “new” General Motors and consider just one of the many sets of decisions that brought the old GM to today’s condition. The relationships between management and the UAW have been rocky for a long time and both parties “bought peace” through contract language that provided unsustainable benefits for laid-off and retired workers. Unlike the DDT story, where the decision-makers may not have fully understood the science and biology involved, the long term impact of the contract language with GM and the UAW could have been seen by any good actuary and could have predicted the conditions facing both parties today. (Hmmm, did they?) Maybe the executives thirty  years ago knew fully well that they were laying the groundwork for a future problem. They just knew it wouldn’t happen on their watch.

So what do these simple stories have to do with you and your ability to make decisions? First, be careful when you’re dealing with situations that are novel and have yet-to-be-understood consequences. Go back to the skill of Observing and put a system in place to actively watch for early warning signs and be prepared to alter your decision.  Second, “run the numbers” well into the future for decisions that have quantifiable consequences and then use the skill of Challenging to test all assumptions. (Who knows, maybe GM execs in years past thought they made good decisions? It may be that their assumptions were overly optimistic.)  

Where have you seen organizations neglect to consider “the futurity of present decisions” and what have been the (unintended) consequences.