When it comes to decision making, deciding how to decide is the most decisive factor. Are you going to decide by yourself? Ask for advice? Let your mom decide? Or debate with your management team for hours until consensus is reached? We answer intuitively, and when our intuition fails we end up with less time, less energy, and more frustration.
Sustainable Decision Making
Brain energy is a valuable and depleting resource
- The decision making process converts brain energy into decisions
- As we make more decisions our brain energy drops, making us tired, demotivated, and bad at decision making
- Sustainable decision making is about managing your brain energy
- Demand reduction: If you make fewer decisions, you’ll use less energy; Efficiency: if you reduce the energy it takes to make a single decision, you will use less overall
Methods of Decision Making
Who’s involved in the decision and in what way?
- Command
- Consult
- Vote
- Consensus
- The relevant people to the decision vote
- To increase sustainability, we want to choose the most efficient method that is applicable
Consensus is terrible
It is a sure way to waste a lot of energy and time for multiple people
- Use it only when you have to
- When you do, align on the decision making process first
- In Business, most consequential and irreversible decisions in business should be resolved with Consult
- The only exceptions are fundamental questions that no one person owns
Command
When one person commands the decision
- Best suited for situations where the stakes are low and input or buy-in from others doesn’t matter much
- Command in Business
- Take command instead of giving it
- Hire great people to do something better than yourself
- Consult others instead of fully giving it to them
- Most decisions are inconsequential
Conclusion
Sustainable decision making is the idea of investing less of your brain energy in these decisions by both deciding less and deciding more efficiently
- When faced with a decision, start with the first method (most efficient) and go to the next method (less efficient) only if necessary
- Decision fatigue or sustainable decision making? The decision is on you
Consult
When one person commands the decision but collects input from others first
- Increases the quality of decisions, as well as buy-in from others, at the cost of draining the brain energy of others
- Only consult people who have faced this decision in their past
- At the end of the day, decide for yourself
Vote is only useful for inconsequential decisions that influence multiple people equally, and where most options are good enough
Don’t be tempted to vote on big decisions or you’ll get mediocre results
- You need your strongest person to own the decision, see the full picture, and make painful tradeoffs
