Steven B. Sample, in The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, shares two rules for making decisions: “Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant” and “Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow.” The key word in both rules is reasonably. The first rule makes sense for several reasons: it develops leadership abilities in your lieutenants, it speeds up the decision-making process by eliminating you as the bottleneck, and it provides an opportunity for others to appeal the decision to you. The second rule also makes sense: waiting to decide provides time to obtain more information and, given the speed with which changes occur, the need for a decision might disappear.
Again, the key word in both rules is reasonably. You don’t want to develop the reputation of being unable or unwilling to make a decision or of being a procrastinator. Remember, choosing not to decide is to decide!
Regardless of how or who makes decisions, it’s important to distinguish between decisions and outcomes. Decisions and golf shots have a lot in common. You can make a terrific golf shot and have a lousy outcome, such as your ball rolling into a divot in the fairway. Likewise, you can make a terrible tee shot and have a great outcome, such as occurs when the ball hits a tree located out of bounds and bounces back into the fairway. The same applies to decisions.
In judging the quality of a decision, don’t base it on outcomes. If you do, you’ll have forgotten it’s possible to make a great decision and have a lousy outcome, just as it’s possible to make a lousy decision and have a great outcome. Some people, seemingly, can slip and fall into a mud puddle and come out smelling like a rose. They can make lousy decisions and look like winners.
Regarding lousy decisions, UA’s president, Alan Sugg, reminded students in my leadership class, “There is no half-life on bad decisions.” People won’t forget your bad decisions. If, perchance, they do, don’t worry because there’s someone who’ll never forget them—you! Memories of good decisions fade, but lousy decisions are never forgotten.
So, how do you judge the quality of a decision objectively? The only way I know to do so is to answer the question: Given all the information available at the time the decision was made, would you make the same decision again if given the opportunity? The key is “all the information available at the time.”
Consider the decision President George W. Bush made to invade Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein, and remove weapons of mass destruction, which were never found. When asked if it was a mistake to invade Iraq, Condoleeza Rice, who served as National Security Advisor at the time, points out the challenges of second-guessing decisions because you didn’t have today’s knowledge when you made yesterday’s decision. Because all available information indicated Hussein had weapons of destruction and their use was imminent, the decision was made to act quickly.[i]
As another example, consider people in high-level executive positions with a company who decided to retire on January 1, 2020. They had options to purchase thousands of shares of stock at a very low price compared to the market price on January 1, 2020; the options vested upon retirement. For the stock option portfolio, if they exercised the options and sold them immediately, their income would be three times what it would have been if they had retired four months later.
The fickle finger of fate (in this case in the form of a global pandemic) can play havoc with outcomes, regardless of decisions. Again, don’t judge the quality of a decision based on outcomes; they occur at different points in time. Between the decision and the outcome many uncontrollable and unpredictable things can occur, affecting the outcome.
Rather than engage in buyer’s remorse and second-guessing your decisions, once a decision is made invest all your energies in ensuring that the outcome will be positive. Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, reminds us, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”[ii] We should remember the past and learn from it, but we shouldn’t dwell on it. What’s done is done. Pay more attention to the windshield than the rearview mirror. Don’t let the past be an anchor. Move on!
As George Washington stated in a letter to his friend John Armstrong, on March 26, 1781, “We ought not to look back, unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors.” [iii]
Next: Heart versus Head
[i] David M. Rubenstein, How to Lead: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2020, pp. 248-250.
[ii] See https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/those-who-cannot-remember-past-are-condemned-repeat-it-george-santayana-life-reason-1905.
[iii] See https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-05206.
