It’s Not An Illusion: Decision Making Is Getting More Difficult
If you think it is more difficult to make decisions in 2019 than it was ten or twenty years ago, you’re not deluded. There are three key things that have changed over the past two decades. All of these factors are impacting leaders on the decision making front.
The future of work is uncertain.
In 2019, leaders face great uncertainty about what will happen next as automation transforms the economy. We know that change is coming. What we can’t seem to predict is the scale of this forthcoming change. One recent MIT Technology Review article concluded that “no one seems to be on the same page” about how automation will impact the workforce. One oft-cited Oxford study concludes that 47% of U.S. jobs are at high risk of vanishing due to automation. By contrast, an OECD study suggests that only 9% of jobs in the OECD member countries are at risk. A 2017 McKinsey report is equally vague. It suggests that anywhere from 400 million to 800 million jobs worldwide might disappear by 2030. Whatever the outcome, all this means leaders and employees face growing insecurity about the future.
Choice is now ubiquitous.
A few decades ago, if you wanted to order in, you likely had just a few choices. In today’s on-demand economy where you can get anything delivered at any time of day, you might face hundreds of options rather than just a few. But choice isn’t simply making it more difficult to decide if you want Italian or Thai. Choice is also making it more difficult to make decisions that may have a long-term impact on your career, your employees and your business. The bottom line is that we do have more options than we did in the past in all realms of life. While this is something to celebrate, it is impacting our decision making processes on every level. Some researchers even suggest that it is leading to paralysis (see, for example, Barry Schwartz’s take on this subject).
Distributed workforces often throw a wrench into the picture.
The best distributed work teams are defined by trust, communication and transparency. Unfortunately, distributed teams don't always invest in fostering these conditions. Without trust, communication and transparency, decision making is compromised. After all, under pressure and faced with ambiguity, you start to make more assumptions. For example, a leader might assume that what he or she sees or hears on the ground in their home location holds true across locations. When this is false, leaders risk making important decisions without the information needed to make the best decisions.
Favor integrative decision making.
Remember the “Seasoned Executive’s Decision-Making Style” (registration required)? It is a classic article about decision-making that appeared in the Harvard Business Review back in 2006. I still recommend this article, especially to middle managers hoping to move into executive roles. But a lot has changed since this article first appeared.
Kenneth R. Brousseau and his colleagues outline four types of decision making styles: decisive, flexible, hierarchic and integrative. Their breakdown of styles remains insightful. But since they published their article, some types of decision-making approaches have become more dominant. Most notably, decisive (i.e., put a plan in place and move into action) has declined, while integrative has gained ground. But as any leader will admit, an integrative approach is also more challenging and requires a lot more bandwidth to execute.
As Brousseau and his colleagues observe, “People using an integrative style don’t necessarily look for a single best solution. Their tendency is to frame any situation very broadly, taking into account multiple elements that may overlap with other, related situations. Consequently, they make decisions that are broadly defined and consist of multiple courses of action.” In many respects, this is an ideal way to work amid ambiguity since it recognizes that “decision making for the integrative is not an event, but a process.”
Manage your bandwidth and stress.
The more complex a decision, the more critical it is for leaders to be able to shift gears, get perspective and remain agile. To do so, they must pay close attention to bandwidth management. In other words, leaders must proactively carve out time and space to think deeply and weigh multiple perspectives.
If decision making is increasingly a process rather than an event, however, it is also going to be more stressful. When conceived of as an event, you can make a decision and walk away from it. You decide, and then life goes on. When conceived of as a process, you are committing to live with your decisions over time and to constantly return to them. To ensure you’re fully prepared to make decisions amid ambiguity, then, it is also important to manage your stress.
