Contrary to everything you’ve heard or experienced, debating pros and cons is not the way to make a decision! As with many practices—practices like SWOT and the pursuit of low-hanging fruit—just because it’s common doesn’t mean it is effective. So here is the problem.
Clarity for lease. Imagine that! Sign the lease and suddenly: You have a new sense of strategic clarity. You know exactly what you are trying to accomplish. You have a vision that will clearly set you apart in the eyes of desirable markets. You know what kind of organization you have to become to deliver on that vision. You have a plan. It is ambitious, but also feasible and flexible. You are prepared because you know plans fail. Your employees understand what you want to achieve and why. Furthermore, they understand quite specifically how they will contribute to the organization’s success. But that’s not all!
Since military leaders make decisions affecting the fates of nations and millions of lives, one would like to think their decision-making skills are as carefully honed as their combat skills. So I was gratified to find plenty of reassuring evidence among the leaders of the Norwegian Resistance in the excellent book by Neal Bascomb called The Winter Fortress. Bascomb’s book provides several examples of consistently excellent decision making. Whether this was the result of specific training, excellent role models, or natural clarity, I will never know. However, the contrast between their uncommon methods and the way most people approach decisions is like night and day.
I’ve written numerous articles about clarity blindness and the general inability of people to recognize the ubiquity of disclarity surrounding us. Today I want to share four critical reasons why you need to make clarity a priority. Clarity represents a huge opportunity whether you care about profits, productivity, employee engagement, confidence, commitment, conflict, or politics.
A few weeks ago, I wrote “8 Secrets Smart People Know About Time Management.” Among other things, I explained that there are five effective ways to deal with having too much to do and one of those is to accomplish more faster. People try to do this all the time. They buckle down. They shut out distractions. And then they beat themselves up for failing. Why do they fail? Because they aren’t really doing anything differently. You know the old adage about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. By that definition, most people are nuts. Every week, every day, they do essentially the same things and hope that somehow they will get caught up. On top of that, people are faced with endless advice ranging from little tips to vast programs like Lean. Most people do not have time to digest all that they read or invest heavily in a process like lean. So here’s a simple way to reconsider your work and find a shorter, faster path. No new vocabulary or special tools are required. You can get as fancy as you like – but do that later. To get started immediately, embrace these staggeringly simple steps to accomplishing more:
What’s the very first decision you make each day? For some it comes while still in bed. “Should I get up or hit the snooze button?” For those who lay their clothes out the night before, have no children, and are locked into an unwavering morning routine, including the content and quantity of breakfast, that first decision of the day can be postponed. Now that I’ve written that, I’m really curious to know how long someone could actually avoid that first decision. Not that it matters. Avoiding a few dozen decisions in the morning may reduce initial stress, but it’s only a drop in the bucket of what’s to come. We make thousands of decisions every day. Many are easy, but others are complex, stressful, or both. Because there are so many decisions and because they are literal forks in the road with dramatic impact on results, costs, time, feelings, and relationships, how you make decisions is extremely important. This is why decision-making is a top priority when I work with clients to create a culture of clarity. The best way to make decisions involves a four-step process that allows you to “SOAR through decisions,” whether alone or in a group. I won’t go into the details of that process now, because I want to focus on the value of having a process, not the process itself. If your decisions actually follow the four distinct steps of SOAR and involve the right people at each of those steps, with transparency, the benefits are numerous and dramatic:
To Do lists are like blackberries, stealth multipliers producing long canes that arc gracefully across your lawn until the tips take root in new soil. One minute you are dreaming of juicy rewards. Next thing you know, you are ensnared in prickly brambles, surrounded by vicious trip wires, and unable to enjoy the fruits of your labor. And just like blackberries, To Do lists require ruthlessness!
My work just received a boost from science! “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock explains how brains function and how that knowledge can help you improve the way you work. What’s cool is that my advice for creating clarity fits perfectly and provides tangible tips that will not only make your brain work better but will also maximize the performance of the brains with whom you are collaborating. I could write a whole book on this, but let me start by sharing one important point. The prefrontal cortex, according to David Rock: is where much of the heavy lifting occurs in our brains tires easily because it is the newest evolutionarily speaking and simply not energy efficient can only focus on one thing at a time must simultaneously select and retrieve relevant information, push away irrelevant information, and process whatever needs processing That’s a big job for a seriously limited resource!
The corporate world has enjoyed huge leaps in productivity over the last several decades, but all of that improvement has been focused on physical processes, not cognitive processes. Our production lines, ordering, purchasing, picking, and shipping have all been streamlined. Anytime we are moving physical product, or even paper, we are focused on efficiency. Not so with our cognitive processes. The way we think, communicate, and make decisions is just as sloppy as ever. Our mouths are veritable Pandora’s boxes in their ability to create and disseminate confusion. Words and ideas, once cut loose, can be as tough to corral as wild horses. We do not have the shared cognitive processes and language needed to quickly agree on where we are and what must come next.