Ask yourself these five questions.
Management decisions almost always involve uncertainty. But what if you just can’t get the facts you need—or if your colleagues disagree about what you should decide?.
JOSEPH BADARACCO: Good question. It’s basically a situation where the problem, or the issues, or whatever they are in front of you are profoundly unclear. So they may look like lesser of two evils, but sometimes you’re not sure what to count as evil. In other words, there’s always uncertainty in management decisions, of course. But here a lot of basic facts are just missing. And you can’t get a hold of them. And sometimes, you don’t know how to frame the problem either.
First, you have to approach them as a manager. And this means you work with other people, you’ve got the best information you can, use big data if you’ve got that, use analytics if you’ve got that. Get expert advice. Look at options with other people, work the process. Be a good manager. And sometimes, you get an answer. It will be pretty clear, very clear, what you ought to do. But if it isn’t, and it’s gray, then you’ve got to make the decision. And you can’t rely on analytics or frameworks.
It turned out, however in hindsight which is of course 20/20, that he really should have stepped back in more analytical, more objective look at a range of options and a range of future scenarios. And he might have seen what turned out to be the case, really tough times ahead. If you’re a textile manufacturer in America or New England, and he might have had to close down some parts of the operation, which would have been painful given his commitments to workers and communities.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. And then I think one way that you encourage people to do that is with the second question, which is what are my core obligations. So tell me a little bit about maybe sticking with the Malden Mills story, how might that have played out? SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. I mean what is interesting to me is that we have talked about two of the five questions. We haven’t even gotten yet to practicalities. But that’s the third question. Is what will work in the real world? And I just found it so interesting that this came in the middle. It’s not what comes at the end, it’s not where you start.
JOSEPH BADARACCO: Yeah, well who are we is partly philosophical. But it’s also saying, look, you’re not an isolated individual when you make these decisions if you’re a manager. If you’re working with other people, typically in a business there are certain values or commitments. I distinguish between fundamental or core commitments and all the standard stuff you see on the mission on the wall of the mission statements. And the core ones are the ones that people really struggle to get right.
JOSEPH BADARACCO: Two things. First, you would hope that there would be meetings held by the person who’s going to make the decision where people can honestly put their concerns on the table. And the book gives some guidance for how to structure meetings in that direction. So you hope you’ve had a chance to express your convictions honestly. And you hope they’ve been heard.
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