Jogging with Scissors
Learning to make faster decisions in the face of risk
When I was in elementary school, I had an unfortunate encounter with a pair of my mother’s fabric scissors. Not sure if you’ve seen old-school fabric scissors, but they are big, heavy, and sharp. The way the tip of one blade found its way bone-deep into my elbow is completely my fault.
The first floor of our home had a simple layout — two sides divided by one wall, with a narrow hallway stretching from the front door to the kitchen and the dining room and living room on the other side. You could do laps around the downstairs — round and round and round and round. So I got the fantastic idea that I’d tie one end of a ball of kite string to a dining room chair and tie up the inside of the house. Round and round I went, faster and faster with each lap … er … wrap. One of the trips through the living room ended up just that — a trip — right into scissors that my older brother was using for some activity.
They say you’re not supposed to run with scissors.
They could expand that to include near scissors, and I still have the elbow scar to prove it.
Running with scissors is an idiom to describe reckless behavior — where the risk far outweighs the benefit. There is certainly a continuum of safety when it comes to scissors. You can leave them in the drawer locked away and be 100% safe, but that renders them useless. You can run with them — or into them as was my case — and that seems reckless.
How do we make the risk-benefit decision in between 100% safe and reckless? How do we get to a place where we’re jogging with scissors and feeling comfortable moving forward in the face of risk?
In my experience, that depends on who is making the decisions — an organization or you as an individual.
Let’s examine both aspects.
Making Decisions in Organizations
Decision-making in organizations, especially large ones, can be extremely cumbersome. We thankfully live in a world where most organizations aren’t dictatorships. Most decisions are a collaborative process involving multiple people. I work in higher education, where consensus-building and shared governance is considered a sacred value, so decision-making can be a very slow process. We often joke that 99-to-1 is a tie. That’s not a recipe that results in a menu full of fast decisions. So what can we do?
Establish a decision-making framework so that you don’t have to decide how to decide at every decision point. I can’t stress this enough. This framework should define what decisions can be made independently at the various levels of your organization. This creates agency and autonomy throughout your organization and takes the process guesswork out of each and every decision. Just think about the amount of time you save when no one in your organization has to ask the question, can I make this decision on my own?
Establish and continually update your stakeholder maps. Decisions in most organizations fall into a variety of categories, and each of those categories likely has a predictable set of stakeholders. Your stakeholders maps include the people who need to be at the table to help make the decision, the people who need to sign off on the decision, the people who need to be informed of the decision, and the people who will be impacted by the decision. If you keep your stakeholder maps up-to-date, you don’t have to spend time determining who falls into each category for every decision. An additional benefit to this approach is that it puts you one step ahead on your stakeholder communication plan after a decision is made.
Make decision-data an integral part of your organizational culture. So much of what masquerades as risk in organizations is actually lack of data. We don’t know what decision to make because we don’t have enough information about the current state or to project the future. To make good, fast decisions, organizations must establish a culture where decisions are based on data and measures related to performance and outcomes — and the investment is made to put that data at the fingertips of decision-makers in real-time.
Create psychological safety around risk-taking. Fear of failure can be a paralyzing agent when it comes to making decisions. If an organization or team lacks psychological safety where individuals fear making mistakes, those individuals will tend to take fewer risks in their decision-making. This can result in milquetoast decisions or an endless cycle of information gathering and discussion. All organizations make decisions that don’t result in the desired results. People make mistakes. If we have a culture of punishment for those mistakes, we subconsciously slow down all future decisions.
Take an agile approach. Originating in software development teams, the agile approach suggests breaking any process down into smaller stages, each with its own feedback loops for faster iteration. If we apply this to decision-making, we break a big decision down into smaller parts, focusing on what needs to be decided first, acting, gathering feedback on the action, then making the next decisions. For many organizational decisions, the agile approach can lead to faster initial decisions, quicker action, and more flexibility.
Making Decisions as an Individual
As complex as organizational decision-making can be, I think people struggle more with the decisions they have to make as individuals. Whatever toxic combination of fear of failure, risk aversion, poor self-confidence, past experience, or lack of information causes this, so much of what holds us back as individuals is the inability to make decisions and move forward.
Here are a few approaches that have worked for me to accelerate my decision-making speed:
Define your values and goals. Without a north star, it’s very difficult to find the right direction. One of the best ways to help make decisions is the litmus test of which option aligns most closely with our personal and professional values and goals. Not every decision we make has to align with these, but the big ones certainly do.
Abandon perfection in your prediction. There are very few decisions in life that have the exact results we’ve predicted. Individual results will vary, so we shouldn’t put off a decision because we can’t predict all of the outcomes. If our decision results in actions that get us 80% there, that’s so much better than the 0% we’re sitting at right now. We can’t predict the future, so we need to stop trying to be fortune tellers.
Gather just enough information. We’ll never have all the information, nor do we need all the information. One of the things that slows us down is not differentiating between what we need to know and what would be nice to know before making a decision. What we need to know is critical to mitigate risk. What would be nice to know is valuable if it’s at hand, but likely not worth delaying the decision over.
Limit your options. Henry Kissinger famously said, the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. Walk into any grocery store in an America suburb or search for some generic item on Amazon and we’re presented with so many options, our brains can’t make sense of them. The abundance of options makes us seek more information. There are 56 different kinds of vegetable soup on this shelf. We immediately start reading the backs of the cans. There are 89 different laptop bags on Amazon. We’ll spend hours reading the reviews. Most of the options are simply useless distractions, so we need to be harsh in our filtering. Our filters can be our goals and values. They can be a list of certain must haves or don’t wants. But until we’re able to quickly filter down our options, we’re stuck in paralysis by analysis.
Setting deadlines. It is remarkable how good we are at putting off decisions for one reason or another. I can make that decision tomorrow … next week .. next month … next year … never. We can change that completely by tweaking two words. I WILL make that decision tomorrow … next week .. next month … next year … NOW. Setting deadlines for decisions is critical for moving forward. When we give ourselves a reasonable amount of time to collect the information we need, consult with others, and think through a decision and then set a deadline to make the decision, we’re much more likely to make it. This also allows us to communicate with others who might be waiting on our decision. I’ll let you know by next Tuesday.
Focus on benefits. While we should always consider the risks, if they are our primary focus, inaction will be our default. We’ll keep the scissors in the drawer. When we focus on what could go wrong, we lose sight of another important question. What is the cost of inaction? Not making a decision is actually making a decision. And that decision will have its own risks and costs. Instead of obsessing over the risks, we need to make sure we have the benefits of the decision clearly in mind.
Ask for coaching. When I’m feeling stuck in a decision-making process, I always bring in reinforcements to help me think it through. Whether it’s my wife, a friend, or a colleague, having someone who knows how to ask me the right questions to work through the decision is invaluable. When someone coaches us, they’re not giving us the answer or making the decision for us. They are helping us find the decision within us by working through the obstacles we weren’t able to clear by ourselves.
I am slightly conservative by nature when it comes to decision-making. You’ll never catch me running with scissors. But through the approaches I’ve shared here, I’ve developed a quick enough professional and personal decision-making process to the point where I spend most of my life jogging with scissors, reaping the benefits of being decisive while still avoiding the risks of being reckless.