Decision making Paralysis

Internet DNA Podcast

Or Analysis paralysis as it is called... mainly because it has a more catchy name! Why are we struggling to make decisions in the work place, how have meetings impacted this, and what should we do to counter it. Nike as we discover had the right attitude 'Just do it!'

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

I think I lost you there for dreaming of, I don't know, beaches in botany cause I see little bit surprised by this. That's sound quality. You have your introduction. Is it any better now? Oh now it's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. This week we discuss decision making, paralysis analysis, paralysis of its name, explain analysis paralysis. That it's only then that isn't it? Cause it's got a cap. Yeah, exactly. It's just cause it rhymes like things that rhyme really the basis of it is that because you're trying to capture every possible permutation of something that you end up not ever actually doing anything and you get caught in this loop of user stories working out what should happen. Finding sections, going back, finding more user stories. And actually nothing happens. So it's almost the opposite of the idea of agile where largely you're going to operate via exception. So you're basically going to build whatever you can and then test it, see where it doesn't work, fix those bets. So I find it's a bigger problem in larger companies where lots of people are involved all with different priorities and it's just very, very difficult to get over some of these hurdles. I think we should clarify here, shouldn't we in that we're talking about decision making within business. It's just us at home. We have to bite the bullet and make that decision. If we want to buy a house, if we want to choose a takeaway Curry, if we want to yeah, and you dog, it's down to us and there's no one else. We don't have a boss at home going, uh, I'll, I'll just put the options out and let him make the decision. So it's the fact that we're the end of the line, the buck stops with us at home business. The buck stops with the guy at the top and most of us aren't necessarily. The guy at the top was always someone a bit higher. And so we don't somehow have the confidence to take that final decision. And I wonder if that has always been there or if it has become exacerbated. Recently. There are two things here. There are naturally, I'm going to just broadly say two types of people. I'm sure there is much gray in between, but there are people who just make snap decisions and there are people who agonize over every decision. And often what works best is if you have a situation where you've got one of each. Yeah. So you make the people that make the big conceptual decisions and then you get people who worry about the details. And that's actually quite a good solution for a team because generally the big concept, people don't sweat the details, but the details do need to be looked at and the detailed people get so involved in the details that they don't look at the bigger picture. So it's good to have both. What happens in companies is that people that are, let's say, the experts in a field or not necessarily the people that have the agency to make those decisions. And so what you have is the decisions being made by people who don't fully understand maybe the nuance of the issue and therefore nothing really captains because everyone's worried about what the person involved them might think. Everyone's worried about that job. Everybody's worried about their promotion and their pay. And so the easier way, and you see this in countries, so if we look at Russia, the stalling, no one made a decision. No one made a decision because you could get shot if the decision displeased people. So you just didn't make any decisions. You just did as you were told, and you'd become an automate on. A little bit of that is going not quite to the level of Starling, but some of that thought processes involved, which is if I'm not the man that makes a decision, then I'm not the one that's going to get shot for it and therefore I will pass it up the line and eventually pass it up to the lines to someone who's so disconnected to what's actually going on that they're not really the person that wants to make the decision. So they pass it back down the line. That just gets into this horrible loop where everyone has a meeting and everyone sort of agrees things, but nothing actually gets tons of decision paralysis hit. And that's the people that are the details. People that look at every pro and every con and go to it and find data. And that makes it quite difficult to make a decision because you almost know too much. And then there are people that take a holistic view, maybe more of a, you could say it was a gut or a snap judgment and go, I it, this decision went out doing too much reset. And then you'd have the other type of paralysis, which is I'm confident now I know there's all these other people around and above me to be the one that the buck stops with. So I would rather just show it to someone else and then together we can make a decision. Now, I remember when we were running business, I was very happy to make decisions. I didn't find them difficult at all. But interestingly, when I was setting up a design team for a different business, it became easier to come up with the ideas and then rely on the MD to make that final decision. And I could see myself sloping into that way of being from the person that had been bookstores and made the decision maker, which at the time what was quite strange and for me it was because there was so much red tape being brought in, but I think a lot of red tape is actually brought in by the amount of people in the meetings and trying to make the decisions together because you have the voice of everybody, you have compliance over here. Once you one thing you have the hosting guys over here. Once you learn to think, you have the designers wanting another thing and therefore the decision becomes harder. I agree. And so the more people you have in a team, the more views you get and one of the things that also happens is you tend to, if you can offload a decision to someone else, a lot of people are quite happy to do that. That's the human nature is. If you can offload it, you might as well. The other side is that you get very frustrated that you're not the person that you make the decision. You kind of have a very clear of what you need and what you want to do, but it seems impossible to get person that actually has to sign the stuff off to sign it off because they feel unsure or unaware or they feel like it's not. Well, there haven't been enough. That's a really good point. And that brings real job dissatisfactions of the fact that you just can't, your hands tied behind your back is a huge reason, but just not feeling good about yourself, especially when you feel that, although the responsibilities not with you to make the decision that you're the one who's in the firing line. If the deadline's not hit, that's your problem, but you're not the person that controls the timelines. And that can be a really awkward position to be in. And it's one I've been in before. And also we always forget there's a political component to this. In a bigger company, you've got to be aware of what different people's motivations are and navigate that. And that time can be very frustrating as well because you've got to look at a problem from their point of view. And see how you can convince them from that perspective rather than from your perspective. This is why having more and more people to a team can be difficult to manage a project and the cost involved of not making decisions is enormous. The more time you spend discussing these things and the less time you actually make the decision to move forward costs billions. I've been in small businesses where it's taken a year to decide what platform you might want to move forward on. Well you know what, if you'd move forward on that platform and tried it for a year, you'd have a much better understanding and still sitting there debating it. Well actually if you just move forward on both platforms and seeing which one work, this is the kind of approach that I like to take, which is if you don't know cause you can't know, just try it, try it on two small project, try the different things and see where it goes. Especially in the modern age, rare. But you can stand up a server in five minutes of any flavor of any type and have it running. You can test stuff and it's much better to have that knowledge directly that we've tried it, it's worked and that's move forward. Exactly the proof of concept design sprints to create rapid prototyping. It means that in the time and money had spent contemplating it, you could actually be informed and were forward in the right direction. So what we're saying is instead of having the paralysis, just move forward with a and B, try and get some more informed choices on it. If you really can't make the decision or make the decision, try if it doesn't work, move to B. The other big problem is when you've got huge projects is trying to understand the entire project at once rather than saying, well, if we were to start, what would be the core of this project and let's build that and then let's add components around it rather than let's plan this huge monolith where everything's dependent on everything else. And actually you're going to get back into this idea of modularity, agility. The reason why agile, although not well done, mostly is quite a good system, is because what it allows lots of people to do is to work on different little bits. The project all create a minimal league viable production. It's just the base function and artsy connected all together. Does it work? Yes. Okay, let's extend this, but out different teams can work on different things because they're not intrinsically connected. They're actually built as little standalone pieces, but that's a very difficult thing to communicate to more strategic people in the company because they are looking at the whole project and you're trying to say, no, no, no. We're going to build it in digital steps. We're going to build little components and we're going to build them out. And they're like, yeah, but what about this? Yeah, we'll get there, but we need to first of all, make sure right at the beginning that this idea works at all. I said, everybody's stuff is happening with the internet and with technology as things got cheaper and easier to do before it just wasn't possible. But the portable process was there because you couldn't get that amount of software or hardware for what you needed on spec for. You actually had to the whole project to order 300 servers, they have to be installed. You have to have an engineering team that has to configure them all. You don't have to do any of that anymore. So previously it was really important that you understood how the steps would work in a waterfall. Same because actually things had to be done. Whereas now you can throw up network and matters of minutes, try it, tear it down again. [inaudible] fast and break things. I think the other things that's interesting is digital is forever changeable. It's forever iterative. In fact, you're positively encouraged to launch and keep trying and keep making better. But if we go back to print, for example, there was a specific deadline and once that deadline was reached, it was in print. There were no more changes. So it focused the mall because there's no doubt and saying things to people, can you check this? We're going to launch, can you check this? We're going to knowledge. Can you check this? We're gonna watch. And then you don't. And then they're like, Oh, look at all these changes. And the same thing happens with print until you go and here's the printer's proofs and you get lots of changes. It seems to be a human condition until it's really almost past imperative that you're not really looking at it properly. But the thing that print was, and then it was done and then you couldn't change it. So you couldn't have all these many in decisions going on. It was too late. You had to, and I think that in a business method was helping decisions move faster and better because once you had sent the proof off to the client, that was it. You couldn't drop them another email and go, I didn't mean that I meant this, or what do you think? You had to be much more precise, but also that turns into a business process. So let's say you're printing a magazine, it becomes a process. Everybody knows after the first time where they sit in that process. And so that reduces that. The thing with digital is that you're constantly reinventing the old days because everything happens so slowly because you have to send a letter, you had to have a very formal process in place because you couldn't do quick little changes because nothing happened quickly. Now we're in an age where anything can be changed at any time, and I think you still have people who have that very waterfall approach, but the projects, all much more fluid, they change. People are used to them changing and people know that, yeah, that's all they don't have to commit, particularly because they know it can be changed. So it's all feeding into this. Well, I don't really have to make a decision thing. In fact, the whole of technology is having a mobile phone means that you don't actually need to make any plans going on holiday these days. You don't have to have planned it. You can just arrive at the airport. And that every little bit of interconnectivity in our lives has meant less than less that we have to plan and make decisions less. We have to plan, but the more we have to make decisions. Previously we had to make decisions up front, but once the decisions were made, you could just run, you didn't have to make any more decisions because it was set in stone. Now everything's so fluid. Then what you spend your life doing is making lots of micro decisions all the time and so like we were talking about last week of is the internet making a stupid, this sort of deluge of having to make decisions. It's probably changing the way we think and how our brain works. Yeah, and I think it's making people feel quite stressed in many ways because everything is a little bit fluid. Like a lot of people like some semblance of control, accident also feel they're in control. Not a thing I have. I quite liked fluidity because for me that feels like opportunity. It feels like freedom, but for many people it doesn't. It feels like, interestingly, the rise of mental health issues that people are saying, is it social media? Perhaps it is to do with the fact that our brains are making split decisions all the time and that's exhausting and unsettling. Great. Your life is so fluid now and there's so little security I think that makes people anxious and also they feel isolated because of the distributed nature of society. I think it's a transitional phase. I think that this is all so new. The internet was what, 1996 for most people. You know that just the other week. Yeah, but for most people, the internet didn't even really start until the mid to late nineties we're 20 years into this project and the real internet that we now imagine really didn't start until mid 2000 the internet as we know it now, you know, the Googles, the Facebooks, those kinds of things. They don't happen until literally within the last 10 12 years. And so as a society, they've been such a shift. I think we've got to understand that there will be some time of realignment and readjustment. And we've gotten a little bit off of analysis paralysis. Talk about analysis paralysis without bringing in meetings because meetings is a great way not to make a decision. And also I really feel myself that technology has enabled us in some ways to become, there's two things about technology. The thing that they hear decisions you have to take time, you have to think deeply and you have to have time for reflection, all of which are things that technology has removed from us. We don't do any of those. Therefore, so making a decision is harder. And secondly, it's all these apps have streamlined our ability to create meetings. For example, you get this little yes button coming into your inbox and there is a maybe or no, but before you know it cause you want to clear your inbox, you've gone yes and you don't even really know why you're meeting or what you're doing, but you've just gone yes and suddenly somebody else has got an hour of your tone. Is that good? This is, yeah. Again, we were talking about, I don't think people have got used to technology yet. You can say no, even if it's just very easy to click a button. I think meetings are a fantastic, when they're used to discuss a series of different viewpoints. If you have somebody who's leading the meeting and that there is an aim to that meeting, which is at the end of this meeting we will have decided X. Then they're fine status meetings where everyone comes in and goes, does that just be done via an email? Or even preferably because I'm beginning to hate. Email would be done by whatever your communication channel is, be it Slack or teams or whatever you're working in. So I agree that external meetings are better than internal meetings. However you sit in the meeting and as we've talked about, you have different types of people, so the quiet people, although they may be the most knowledgeable and not saying as much as the lab people, so you're not necessarily getting the best answers. If everyone emailed the answers to a question, you would probably get a bit quicker because you wouldn't have everyone than talking on that point and B, you would get that honest opinion, not the, I'm sitting in the meeting sensors that I've had not say that as a way of making a decision. It don't make a decision. Everyone's happy to talk about the little things that don't really matter all about should we get a pink microwave or do you think Pink's wrong for the office, but the actual decisions that we need to make, are we going to go ahead with this platform people don't want to commit to so there's a awful lot of discussion and then it's parked and brought up the next week when actually there must be better ways and I think that is communicating your thoughts outside of the meeting and then perhaps meeting to have a vote. Yes, I want this thing to go ahead. Hands up or hands down. I'm going to counter that with yes, there's no point inviting people to meetings. They aren't going to say anything. People that just sit around a desk, scribbling on that scribble pad. People you animating now people actually work through the meetings. Yeah, well then they shouldn't have been in the meeting. That's my opinion. Yeah, or they shouldn't be called in at certain point. Also, probably the biggest problem with meetings is people don't know how to hold meetings. One of your things was the loudest people speak the most and that is a big problem in any way we look at it. It doesn't matter whether it's with a group of friends, whether you're talking about social media, whether you're talking about meetings. The people that shout the loudest tend to have the loudest voice and so as a meeting adjudicator or the meeting leader, your job is to ensure that all voices get heard. It's important to understand who is in charge of the meeting and who is holding the meeting. If it's meeting where everyone just sits around the desk as an equal, you get to exactly to the point that you're talking about where nothing's really decided the loudest people say the loudest things and the make people don't say anything and that is a pointless meeting. I totally agree with that and the amount of man hours that have gone into that. Yeah, it's true. Do you have really good meetings where the person running the meeting has gone around the room and said, right, this is what we need to decide. This is what we're talking about. What is your view? And he's gone around the table to everybody's view and then you've done the second round, which is does everybody agree with what everybody said? And then you get through to the next part. It's about how to run meetings. It's not about meetings themselves. The reason why 90% of our meetings are shit is because, well they are is because there's no point to them. They're just the talking shop. Everyone's just chatting about stuff. It's almost like let's everybody sort of just add, they have views. Well, if that's what you're trying to do, it doesn't fulfill a function. If you've got a meeting, which is we need to decide which one of these we're going to use. I'm going to get this full stakeholders in here, I'm going to collect their opinions, I'm going to then make sure that we are all aligned on those opinions and then we're going to make a decision. This is the one we're going for because it's the one that meets most of our criteria and then we can leave the meeting and the meeting is taken 15 minutes and we're out this four hour meetings where people just chat nonsense. So I think there's a new job if jobs are going and technology is new, jobs need to be created and things. That is a great job. You could be a meeting moderator and you could go around companies everywhere and you're just really good at getting the right outcome. I know. I think that's an excellent job. Yeah. You've gotta be a certain type of person, but you're independent as well, so you're not swayed by the office politics. You're not listening to the big cheese because he's the big cheese. You're actually trying to get everybody's views. And it's really important when you've got people dialing in remotely. Generally you find people who are remote, a no one talks to them. And so it's almost, I would say if you're going to have anybody dialing in remotely, you should have everybody dialing in remote. Well this is why my holograms were going to be so good at this meeting. Moderator as well. He would be greater. We must stop saying what she would be great at is she's been told by the boss, these are the outcomes I need. So how only reason for being in there is making sure that she gets outcome. So she will do it quickly, concise and unbiased. So what we're saying here is to make better decisions, take time to think deeply and reflect away from the noise and Hubba Bubba. Don't try not to have to make split decisions all the time, which is what we're doing as well. When we're reading articles online, there's clickbait, try and read things, do things that means that you can contemplate with decisions. And then in meetings sync before you click yes. Before you invite people and have a meeting. Yeah. I think what you're trying to achieve in the meeting, who was the people that are important to that goal and only invite them and then make sure everybody has a voice and is the best way to make that decision. I mean, I think as well that people come up with better solutions on their own solutions. Also, one of the things that is important is just do it. Nice. Do it, just build it and if it doesn't work, build something else. I bet you could have built four different things, learnt a whole heap about what you're doing, which is probably the most important thing, and then found the solution that probably wasn't either of the solutions that you were looking at at the beginning. You've learned a load. One of the things, what I meant to developers is I'm going to tell you what I want. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because that process of you learning how to do it is actually what I want you to do. That's the part that's important. What I'm trying to do is to get them into that learning mode of trying, failing, trying, failing, trying, failing cause you learn. Cause remember who said it, no one learns anything from success. You learn from your failures and so just start doing something. It's like he said when the precision, the French were building Concorde, we're saying be like the Britain's. Just go ahead and try it. Don't be like the fence philosophizing too much and not committing to the decision. A lot of the time we sit around too much like the friends in that example. What I'm trying to say is that when we talk about the analysis paralysis, that's the inability to start because she can't begin. It's almost like a writer's block. Just do it. We're going to have to just stop. Learn from your failures. We'll speak again next. I want this. If we want you to speak about five gene, repent. We're talking about the possibilities of five G. we'll discuss that. Now I'm going to say bye.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.