Sharing your decision journey helps people live with it
Why the route to a decision is as important as the outcome
I’ve just been reading the reviews, scanning photos, choosing how far we are from the beach, and the shops. When it comes to holidays and where we stay, I do the research in our family. I want to check it’s worth what I’m paying, and that it is what it says it is.
Some people just look at the price and turn up, though often they get something different than they expected. That’s not because the hotel changed, but because the picture they viewed or the image they had in their head was not enough to build honest expectations.
Same destination, completely different experience on arrival and the journey to get there.
But then I think, who chose what was in the photographs? Who chose what was in the information provided and what they missed out? That moment shapes much of what follows. Building expectations long before anybody packs a bag.
Perhaps that’s what I do when I make bigger decisions. I don’t just mean the hotels or the restaurant booking, but the decisions that affect other people. Decisions that I have to communicate or defend and to pass to other people to carry without me in the room.
The curator hiding in plain sight.
The hotel, the supermarket shelf, the annual report, the spa menu, the townhall presentation.
Everywhere we make decisions somebody up stream has already decided what information we deserve to see. I don’t just mean the photograph that shows the pool and doesn’t show the building site next door. It’s also the packaging that shows the farm and not the factory. The leadership communication that announces the destination but doesn’t even attempt to describe the journey the lead to the decision.
We see this in politics. Announcements without reasoning, decisions handed down with the expectations that people can just see themselves in it and get on with in. Destinations without journeys. People lose trust in those making these decisions.
We think we’re making an informed decision but we’re not. The quality of any decision is only as good as the completeness of the information the completeness of the picture we use and that we were shown. There’s always somebody else who decides what’s in the frame what we get to see.
We’re not just making a decision we are continuously working from curated photographs making potentially curated conclusions.
We have all been on the receiving end of this, it isn’t great. But consider now if you changed positions.
When it’s your turn to hold the camera or set the frame in the backdrop do you know that you’re doing it? Are you conscious of what you’re leaving out?
The questions you ask shape what matters.
When you lead others to a decision, to a strategy, to a destination or to a restructure, you are effectively that photographer, that curator.
You see more information than the people you lead. You sat in more information sessions and pre-decisions and you read data they never saw. You took part in trade-offs they weren’t asked about. Then you communicated a decision.
Now here’s the bit most leadership thinking skips over. As you arrive at your decision, it’s not the information itself that tells you what to conclude, it needs to be evaluated or chewed over first. The way to do that is the questions that you bring to it and the things you push back on. The things you dive deep or the things you don’t take for granted. These don’t always come from the data. The new perspectives come from what you value and what you pushed to uncover.
This is why the journey matters, not just the destination. We are all different.
Two leaders in the same room observing identical information can arrive at completely different decisions because they feel different things were worth asking. They see different things in the data.
One asks about costs, another one asks how it costs other people it will land on. One of them asks if it works, when the other asks whether it can be explained to somebody who wasn’t in the room and didn’t have the details. That not a flaw in the process, but a human angle. We bring ourselves to decisions and we can leverage it beyond that moment.
The quality of the decision isn’t just about the information available. It’s very much about how you interrogate it. Your experience, your judgement, your intuition and your willingness to simply ask what the data is not saying as much as what it is.
Did you try to find the angle for the person that wants to see the view past the hotel? Do you try to provide the information that helps the person with poor mobility access services near your hotel? Did you consciously omit it?
Every decision is like the hotel booking with information that affects a ‘go’ or ‘no go’, and the amount of satisfaction that accompanies it in real life.
What matters is crucially whether you feel enough responsibility toward the people who are going to live with the decision, and to ask the questions on their behalf as you decide.
When two people arrive at the same hotel, one researched it and is happy, the other didn’t and feels they don’t get their money’s worth. The pictures sold a great luxurious room, but not services that matched that expectation. They feel mislead, not because anything was a lie, but because it was incomplete information to form the right expectation.
Take people with you early
This happens in the world of work too where people are told the destination not the trade-offs. The reorganisation that didn’t explain why the last structure had to go. Leaders left in the middle unable to answer questions why.
When you make a decision on behalf of others, you become responsible for how they live with or in the decision. Whether a decision lands in reality or not doesn’t sit with decision-maker alone, but with those they need to take it forward.
Leaders who shortcut the journey and simply gives an answer or a partial picture don’t help anybody carry it forward.
People don’t lose faith in decisions per se, but they do lose faith in those who make decisions. Not because the destination is wrong, but because they turn up unprepared.
When you show me how you arrived at your decision it helps you take me with you. When you think about others while deciding, you made decisions that already start to work.
We will never have complete information, not perfect frames or photos to work from. That is not the aim.
The aim is to bring everything you can to evaluating what you have as input. To ensure your values shape the questions you asked, and that those questions were asked on behalf of everyone who will travel with you.
I know I don’t sleep well next to a building site. I know my kids don’t freely walk too far to the amenities. I take that into account. I look further, even though we are all persuaded by the glorious pictures around the pool and the attractiveness of the price, that makes it possible.
I know that when we hit the pillow after a long journey, everybody will be contented. That is, when everybody’s considerations showed up at least in the process of research and not just in price.
So next time you make a decision ask yourself, are you sharing the full picture? Or have you set people up for disappointment when they arrive?
Have a great week.