Making Good Decisions Part 1: Clearing Mental Space

We sustainability and social impact professionals must lead in the face of constant change, complexity, and ambiguity. Especially now in the age of COVID, uncertainty has become our norm.  Making good decisions that we can be confident in can be quite challenging these days!

One of the difficulties I’ve been hearing from my coaching clients is their “decision fatigue”. They feel so overwhelmed and have so much on their plate, they don’t have the mental space to make good decisions. This causes some of them to shoot from the hip and decide on impulse. It causes others to sit on a decision forever, thinking if they keep gathering information, the right answer will reveal itself. Neither option is optimal for getting good results

Cutting back the amount of decisions you need to make is a great way forward. By asking your yourself these three questions, you can take the steps needed to clear the mental space needed to make high quality decisions:
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1. Do I have to make this decision, or is this something I can delegate? Some of the leaders I coach think that they have to have all the answers. That’s just not the case.  The trick is to leverage the best of your team, or maybe all the team, to define the question, create and assess good options, and recommend or even execute the decision.  For more info on how to delegate, check out Coaching for Leaders podcast with Cisco’s Hassan Osman.  Even if you don’t have a team, you have colleagues you can try to delegate to or trade with, who might be better suited or have more capacity to take on the task.​

1. ​2. If I don’t decide today, might it go away?   Maybe you’re like me and have a “bias towards action”.   I’ve made my fair share of horrible decisions just to get them off my plate.  What if we just sat on it for a while? Sometimes the problem just goes away magically.  Check out this video with Dave Ramsey for more tips on this tactic.

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3. Is it something I must decide on my own, or can we decide as a group? Group decisions take more time, but generally lead to better framing of the challenge, more creative options, and higher quality assessments.  Group decisions also generate buy-in.  If you’re dealing with a complex, adaptive challenge, ask the team (or form a group) to help you. 
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Want to learn more about high quality decision-making? Join ISSP’s leadership training webinar on decision-making, July 23rd, 1 PM EST.