Decisions, Decisions

There are two classes of decisions. The first is the easy kind. For instance, how do you choose which features to include in the next release of your product? It's a pretty straightforward process: Survey your customers, identify the information you need, and formulate a decision by using rational, objective measurements. The second class is the tough kind. For instance: Should you hire this person? Should you go after this key market? Should you switch jobs? Should you have a kid? These are bet-your-life decisions for which there's no obvious right or wrong answer - and no way of gathering objective information.

To tackle decisions of either class, I first kick into a talkative mode. I ask everybody I know to give me an opinion. I get different perspectives - and I listen to them. I also listen to that thing called intuition. Some people warn against that approach. But there's a kind of processing that happens in a far deeper place than logical processing does. Intuition offers a way to integrate and synthesize, to weigh and balance information. If I have to make a big decision, I listen to what others think. But ultimately, I listen to my intuition. I postpone a decision until I wake up one morning and know where my gut is going.

Deborah Triant was president and CEO of Sitka Corp., a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, before she joined Adobe Systems as president of marketing in 1993. In 1995, she left Adobe to head Check Point, a network-security and traffic-management software company.

Roger Rainbow

VP, Global Business Environment
Shell International Ltd.
London, England

Nothing can paralyze a decision-making process more than uncertainty can. The big decisions that have failed at Shell didn't fail because of our operations or because of project management; they failed because we misunderstood the external world. That's why, when we're on the verge of a big decision, we do scenario planning. A scenario is valuable because it's a plausible, coherent story that we can use to articulate why we want to do something and which issues to factor into the decision-making process.

Everyone has two things in mind when approaching a big decision. The first thing is a scenario - a view of how the world will turn out. The second thing is an objective or a strategy. A good decision-making process marries those two things.

Decisions fall into three categories. With the first category, you know a lot. Take a plant that's been operating for 20 years. You know what makes it succeed or fail, and the decisions you take regarding it tend to be fairly straightforward. They may be hard to implement, but they're simple to make.

With the second category, you know something but not everything. This is where scenario planning helps. For instance, if we're trying to decide whether to invest in an oil field in Russia, we talk about which factors are uncertain and why. What has to happen in order for this investment to succeed? What could go wrong? What would the consequences be? Are any of those consequences absolutely catastrophic? If so, how can we guard against them?

With the third category, you know virtually nothing, and you're starting from scratch. This is where intuition comes into play - and where you make truly creative decisions: You're deciding on things that haven't been done before.

Each category of decisions requires different skills and processes. Understand which kind of decision you're facing, and use scenarios to narrow the range of uncertainty.

Roger Rainbow (roger.r.rainbow@si.shell.com) joined Shell in 1970. His team provides analyses of the business environment by preparing long-term scenarios that consider economic, social, technological, and environmental issues, as well as the long-term supply and demand of energy sources.

Chris Newell

Executive Director, the Lotus Institute
Lotus Development Corp.
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The crux of making good decisions isn't doing things right - it's making sure that you focus on the right things. As citizens of the Information Age, we're overwhelmed with data, reports, facts - much of it noise that we need to filter out before we can figure out what's relevant to a decision. So I've learned to hone my discrimination skills. But if you're exploring something that has no precedent - an idea, a product, a service - you can't rely solely on data to guide you. You have to rely on people too. I've developed a personal advisory council that I consult before tackling a big decision, a group of people who are anchored by similar values - though not necessarily by similar perspectives.

Sometimes making the "wrong" decision is the right thing to do. Last year, I decided to overrun my budget - to continue investing in LearningSpace, a product that Lotus was unsure about investing in. I knew it was the right thing to do, even though I couldn't get the company to agree. When news of my decision surfaced on the radar of some key people, I got hammered. At times, I even doubted my own decision. A year later, LearningSpace has become one of Lotus's most important strategic products.

I made one mistake: I didn't communicate all of the implications of going over budget. Otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing about what I did.

Chris Newell founded the Lotus Institute in 1994. Its mission is to explore ways in which groupware technology intersects with cultural issues. It has developed two applications: TeamRoom, which supports virtual teaming; and LearningSpace, which supports collaborative, distributive learning.