As a strategist and product manger, I’ve been inspired by decision making frameworks. Decision making models give us simple and efficient paths to make more effective decisions.
Over the last few years I’ve read three books that capture three highly valuable decision making models. In my opinion, these books offer a new way to think about how we weigh up choices and make decisions.
The books are Blink, Checklist Manifesto and Simple Rules.
Each of these book writes about a very challenging idea. The idea that, in some circumstances, decision making can be made more effective using streamlined techniques.
So streamlined and simple that our rational brain may have a hard time accepting that these techniques can produce effective results when compared with more traditional models.
Examples of more traditional models are those described in Peter Drucker’s well known article on effective decisions or Dartmouth’s 7 step decision-making process.
Blink, Checklist Manifesto, and Simple Rules suggest decision making:
- using a streamlined process for decisions and actions that is exponentially faster to other more time intensive approaches, while being equally as effective.
- relying on simple principles that have, already built within them, logic that distill wider lessons, insights and data.
- a connection with deeper knowledge that is either known by you already (through your experiences) or based on knowledge from the applied practice of other experts.
- by using a framework that is specific to the context and set of circumstances it is intended for (eg. pilots using checklists specific to take off protocols).
Each of these books suggest there are ways to operate faster, with equal to or less risk than alternative decision making processes, in repeatable ways, often with greater flexibility.
Let’s take a look at the high level lessons from each book.
Thin-Slicing for Decision Making
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that“there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”
Gladwell refers to the concept of “thin-slicing,” where we take our observations in a given moment, apply our learnings from experience and intuition, and make rapid decisions.
In some circumstances, these snap decisions can be as or more effective than those that take months to deliberate.
The distinction here is on how you can train your intuition.
Untrained intuition that is not based on experience and learning, can lead to bad decisions, with even worse outcomes. In contrast, trained intuition based on experience can provide unparalleled speed and results.
What is fascinating about Blink is the idea that our experience leads to expertise and this expertise can be drawn upon in a split second for effective decision making.
In Blink, Gladwell gives many examples of where thin-slicing has proved accurate. Included amongst these is the acquisition of a sculpture by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Upon acquiring the sculpture, a number of resident experts had a “gut feeling” that something was “off” with the work. Some time later, the sculpture was found to be inauthentic.
There are two lessons for us in this. The first is to revisit those instincts and gut feelings we may all have, but don’t pay attention to. The second is to think more broadly about the model proposed by Blink; that based on your own area of expertise, you will have developed lessons and intuitions, honed through hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of practice.
Reforge, a San Francisco startup, recently raised Series B funding on the concept that Product Managers have periods of intense learning in their careers where they acquire valuable expertise.
These periods have ‘inflection points’, where this expertise can be strengthened to equip them for their next challenge. Reforge aims to capture these lessons and share them with wider communities and thereby challenge traditional models of skill creation.
Though this is seperate from Blink, both Reforge and Blink tug at the same thread – that experience leads to expertise and knowledge which can be applied to respond to a parallel situation (eg. a new product launch program) in a new context (a different company) to provide a better outcome.
How To Use
Consider the timeline of your career:
- What are the experiences that shaped your career to who you are today?
- When have these experiences resulted in new knowledge for you that, consciously or unconsciously, you have embedded into how you operate?
- Have these experiences changed how you use instinct and gut feeling to approach decisions? Do you listen to or ignore those instincts?
- When you have used your instincts for decision making, have these decisions proved effective in the medium term?
I’m not suggesting to use gut feeling and instinct as the sole principle to make decisions.
However, as leaders and managers, listening to what our expertise and intuition may tell us, can improve our own self awareness and make us better leaders.
We can make this more robust by identifying when our instinct kicks in, and testing these decisions with deeper analysis, to see if our instinct is consistent with what wider data validates over the medium term.
Checklists For Decision Making
According to Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, though we have amassed incredible “know-how” in the 21st century, “avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralising and frustrating.” We need a new strategy for overcoming the burdens of too much data and failure, a strategy that “takes advantage of the knowledge of people but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacy” (p13).
Based on his research, Gawande suggests that this new strategy is the Checklist.
Gawande documents how a simple checklist was rolled out to a group of hospitals in both developed and underdeveloped nations, to curb the rising tide of millions of surgical complications that occur worldwide.
While the checklist was important, the way it was executed was equally so, often involving a simple principle that upturned the contemporary practice of many hospitals – if the pre-surgery checklist had not been satisfied, the nurse in charge could prevent the surgeon from proceeding with the operation.
The Checklist does not replace human knowledge and decision making. Rather, it is a tool that streamlines what is required to maximise the opportunity for success, based on what has been learnt from processes that have been rolled out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times.
Pilots use checklists methodologically in pre-flight routines. Product Management teams use checklists to ensure that software has passed key gates (eg. user acceptance testing, integration testing, etc) before it is released. Australian companies, like Safety Culture and Culture Amp, provide products inspired by the checklist.
Checklists can take the form of read-do lists (ie. a recipe is a simple read-do checklist) or do-confirm lists (ie. confirm something is done before moving to the next step).
Checklists are a powerful instrument because they support decisions (eg. if we have confirmed the patient’s name matches the surgery required, we decide to move to the next step) as well as diffuse who has the authority to make the decision (ie. if the correct step has not been followed, any person in the operating theatre can stop the process, not just the surgeon).
Checklists improve decision making by automating simple and repeatable processes that have been proven to work.
People involved in these processes can rely on the checklist for those processes that are known, and focus their energy on elements of the process that are ambiguous or require further thought.
How To Use
- In your own work, are there specific and repeatable processes where decision making is required, that could be partially automated by a checklist?
- If so, are there examples from both your company and the best practices of other companies, that could form the basis of a checklist?
- Once you create a draft checklist, confirm it with all members of the team involved in the process. Is it simple enough to be followed and also detailed enough to be useful? The checklist should contain the most important steps of a process, not all steps.
- Where and how would you implement this checklist? Who within the team would have the authority to stop a process if the checklist was not met?
Simple Rules For Decision Making
Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull are the authors of Simple Rules.
Through their research, they’ve analysed how companies apply no more than a few rules to focus their decisions and ensure ongoing success.
From Nike to Yahoo, simple rules provide structure for such decisions as which markets to expand into, how to grow new products, and when to exit a business or product line to minimize losses.
According to their model, simple rules can be broken down into the following categories:
- Boundary rules: which opportunities to select?
- Prioritizing rules: how to filter amongst many options?
- Stopping rules: when to quit or exit?
- How-to rule: how to move forward?
- Coordination rules: how to work with each other and collaborate?
- Timing rules: when to act?
Simple rules act as a bridge between strategy and practice, connecting day-to-day decisions and actions with broader plans. They can help teams perform at their best by removing the paralysis that comes with evaluating too many alternatives.
Like checklists and thin-slicing, simple rules give another alternative to streamline decision making. Equally, to be effective, these rules must be based upon exisiting knowledge of what works, focused on a specific problem, and connected to a learning loop that refines the practice of these rules overtime.
How To Use
The book’s authors have written a useful article on how to apply simple rules, which is broken down into these steps.
- Identify the bottleneck. This is where demand exceeds resources, and thus the organization is stopped from achieving its goals.
- Listen to data, over opinion.
- Allow people who will have to follow the rules, create them.
- Follow the rules.
- Evolve the rules based on what works.
Now, I’m not saying these models (thin slicing, checklists and simple rules) are perfect. Or that they should replace alternative, more detailed, decision making.
I am suggesting that for leaders and managers, they are a great first place to look, because they are very effective. If we can leverage these methods, they also offer high benefits in speed and efficacy.
