Notes on courage and decision-making

Learning to make smart, courageous judgment calls

An organization we're working with needs to create a more courageous, decisive, and accountable leadership culture.  We're helping them explore two paths related to courage via Decision Mojo, our learning laboratory for improving decision-making.

In organizations where it feels like there could be a high price to pay for a decision that doesn’t work out perfectly, the first and probably the most important path is to reduce the perceived or actual risk associated with a decision you need to make. While there are many useful techniques for doing this, we’ll briefly mention three:

One technique is to break a big decision down into a series of smaller, lower-risk decisions that you can make quickly and that won’t sink the ship if one of the decisions doesn’t work out. Not only can you learn from each of these smaller decisions and feed your knowledge and experience base for the bigger decision, the actual data and feedback you acquire is closer to the action and may be more reliable than other information. One expert calls these making “little bets”.1  We call these small bets mini-experiments that both test some aspect of the bigger decision and help move you towards that bigger decision.

Another technique is to metaphorically “buy insurance” on the decision. You could think of this as being like the helicopter evacuation insurance Brent bought before his trek to Everest Base Camp back in late 2018 so that if he had severe altitude sickness or some other emergency, he could be airlifted off the mountain. In an organization, it might take the form of having an escape hatch on a decision if it isn’t working out or setting a tripwire where you agree to revisit a decision in the future and change or reverse it if new data suggests a better course of action.

Or, it could mean simply contracting in advance with your boss or boss’s boss on some risky decision (or serious stretch goal) such that if it doesn’t work out perfectly, you won’t get seriously dinged for the result. We have learned that smart leaders would rather have leaders below them make courageous decisions that push the organization forward rather than make no decision and simply reinforce the status quo.

A third technique is to use our “RISK” framework to assess the decision as a way to determine whether you or your team can make the decision, or whether you should escalate the decision.

The second path is to change your own mindset to accept you will never have 100% certainty on any decision (otherwise it wouldn’t be a decision). As the French philosopher Voltaire pointed out, “Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.”

To this end in Decision Mojo, we teach things like the 70% Rule, Separate the Signal from the Noise, Avoid Resulting (aka, focus on what you can control – the decision process – vs the result, which you can’t always control), Learn from Experience, and Embrace the Uncertainty by thinking of each decision an “experiment with the future” that you will learn and grow from.

Undoubtedly all of us have, at some point or another in our lives, been frozen in a decision process, unable to decide or make a decision because we’ve been afraid of making the wrong decision. It is, as Voltaire says, an uncomfortable, often energy-sucking position in which we wish for the courage to make the call, or any call in some cases. For without a decision, there is no movement, no action, no progress, and possibly no growth.

Jeff Bezos encourages Amazon employees to be decisive and then course-correct, saying, “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”2

Indeed, Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

But that takes courage.

The relationship between decision-making and courage is profound, yet what courage looks like for each of us is likely very different. One person may be willing to decide to trek to Everest Base Camp and yet be completely terrified about a decision to play a musical instrument in front of a few friends. Another person might think deciding to do such a trek is utter insanity yet be quite comfortable strumming a guitar in front of hundreds.

At best, we keep building our courage muscle with each decision we make. As leaders, we need to create an environment where those we lead feel able to make courageous decisions when they don’t have 100% certainty, knowing they need not fear retribution or ridicule if the decision doesn’t work out. And as leaders, we are called to role model what it means to challenge the status quo and make smart, courageous judgment calls when the only thing you know for sure is that you don’t know 100% for sure how they will turn out.

Sources on courage and decision-making

1 Little Bets by Peter Sims

2 Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath

3 Jeff Bezos 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders