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on regrets
I am more in the Edith Piaf camp here, rather than that of Paul Anka’s words as made famous my Frank Sinatra, amongst others. I really don’t have regrets.
Taken in isolation there are things that I have done that I would have preferred to have done differently. I know, for example, that I have hurt people and am not proud of that. Overall though, the steps that I took back in the first half of my life so far brought me into the life of the Berkshire Belle, and I have been with her ever since. So no regrets.
I think that there are two factors in the way that I approach life. The first is the way that I was brought up by my parents, my teachers and the other adults from my early days. They taught me that decisions had consequences, and that I had to live with the results of my own decisions. “You’ve made your bed, so you have to lie in it” was a saying I heard many times, and it is true.
The other factor is that, from early on in my working life, I got trained in a variety of management skills. This reinforced the understanding that things were going to happen regardless of anything that I did, and so ou had to decide, not just what to do, but when, and, sometimes, whether, to do it. As a manager you needed to assess the consequences of every option: You needed judgement.
You get better at this stuff as you gain experience and, of course, you learn from your mistakes. One, very common, mistake is to overlook learning from your successes too, bit, if you are any good, you’ll work that one out.
As a manager almost everything that you do will please some and upset others. You lay on overtime, so some will see that as great because of the extra pay, but others will be unhappy because they miss out on something by being at work. If you place a contract the successful company will be glad of the order, but others will have lost out and, if you are big enough, that might be the final straw that means one of them will have to lay off people. There are always winners and losers: This is real life.
As an individual I have been shaped by my experience and my professional life flows over into my private one. I am very good at compartmentalising for one thing, but I also apply the logic of trying to understand what the consequences will be for anything I decide to do. I am well aware that there can be casualties.
I learned very early on that I had married the wrong woman (my first marriage), and I struggled with the decision of what to do about it, working from leaving her and our two children through suicide (I had a very good compensation package). There was no easy answer, but in the end I left, and, there under my nose, was the woman of my dreams. We are together still.
I have done a lot in my seventy years so far. Some of it has been stupid, especially in the early years, but I have done some good stuff too and have experienced far more than I could have dreamt of as a boy. I am content with my life, I understand and accept who I am, and I live with the woman that I love and who loves me.
I can’t go back and change anything and so, for me, regrets are a pointless emotion. I’ve done what I’ve done, and none of it was with malice. I take responsibility for what I have done. Regrets? No, I regret nothing.
on decision making
to make a decision you need choices and information and therein lies a problem. We have available to us a vast resource of information that, for the majority, you only need to pull a slim device from your pocket and prod your finger at a few times to access. When I was young our family had an old Webster’s dictionary and a second hand atlas to refer to, but now you can find almost anything out in a matter of seconds.
Of course there is a lot out there that just isn’t true, but what is worse is that so often people just head for these dreadful echo chambers full of people who think the same way. What happened to critical thinking? This slavish belief in things that people have heard and refuse to submit to any sort of challenge or test is going to lead us as a society into all sorts of problems. Forget global warming, society is likely to collapse well before we all start to fry.
In recent years I have watched corporate decision making become dominated by the computer. Data can be modelled and the decision making process has moved more and more towards doing what the machine tells you to do. I have been a big fan of having the computer fed by doing the work rather than data being input manually and I have designed or coded a lot of such programmes. I have reaped their benefits too as an operator.
However, to just slavishly accept what the machine tells you to do puts decision making in jeopardy if you don’t understand where the data that it is using is coming from and what the parameters the algorythms that the computer programme uses to manipulate that data are. A recent example was in fully automating vehicle scheduling where the computer was sending vehicles out anything up to three hours late because of allowing for driver’s statutory rest periods.
Once the problem had been spotted it was relatively easy to reset some of the parameters the programme was using to make it do what was required, but an experienced human would have made different decisions and the problem would not have arisen.
Some systems are genuinely sophisticated. Take the software that controls a modern military aircraft. These are inherently unstable and cannot be flown in a conventional way, but the commuter systems take control inputs from the pilot and make the ‘plane fly accordingly. I am a lot happier with a conventional stick and rudder with some nice cables making things do what I ask, but then the sort of things that I flare not fast jets.
But back in the world of commercial decision making, or even personal decisions, we first need information and then need to know how to interpret it. We need to understand the consequences of our actions. All too often I see younger managers having an idea and going for it with no real critical thinking about whether or not it will work. There seems to be a culture of “I’m going to do this and it will work”.
I’m all for confidence, it’s a fundamental element of leadership, but blind confidence is dangerous. Yes, time for deliberation may not be plentiful, or even available, but a least have a process for decision making mapped out to that you can make the best decision in the time that you have. The more that you apply a decision making process you will, allied with the experience you have gained, get better and better at doing it.
It is also worth having a post mortem, not for apportioning blame, but to understand how closely the outcome matched your expectations. If you were lacking certain information then see what you can do to have it more readily available. If there were resource issues then try to find a way of getting faster access.
I once was asked how I was getting on a few days into a new job and relied that I couldn’t get my head out of the trench for long enough to work out which way the bullets were coming from. I was just fire fighting all day every day, but after a couple of weeks I was beginning to make progress. By improving information flow we started to get away from decision making being purely reactive and began to control our destiny.
Decision making needs to remain a human intervention. Even in a military aircraft the pilot is still making decisions: The software translates those decisions into action. It is a skill that we need to preserve, to take information, examine it critically and act on the choices that we make with a good understanding of what the consequences will be.
on decisions
A perennial topic this one, but the current criticism of the government here in the UK prompted my thoughts because one of the most usual causes of decision paralysis is getting it wrong; if you don’t make a decision you can’t make the wrong one.
I am talking here about critical decisions because there are unimportant things where doing nothing is often the best corse of action, but when there is something important to be done you should do something so not doing it is most certainly wrong.
A favourite quote of mine is from Yogi Berra the American baseball star; “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. Decision making in business or government is more complex than the 50:50 chance of getting it right or wrong, but you are working with three parameters; time, knowledge and resource. Of those you cannot control time and you may not be able to control resource or knowledge before time runs out.
You have to go with the best that you have and accept that you might not get it right. Be decisive and, once it is over and you can see what happened, look at whether or not you could do it better next time. An investigation is essential, but it should never be about blame, always about learning and improving.
Every decision you make will have consequences, but doing something is both an opportunity to learn and it puts experience into the pot for when you have to make the next decision. Fear of failure is an instinctive response, but one that you need to push past if you are to grow. The more you do the more experience you have and experience helps you respond to the consequences of your actions.
Another sporting hero provides an appropriate response here. Eric Carlson was one one the finest rally drivers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time when rally cars were simply tuned up versions of road cars and safety equipment minimal. He was asked what went through his mind when he approached a blind brow in the forest at night whilst driving at over 100mph. He thought for a moment and said; “Well, the road must go somewhere”. That is experience talking. It gives the confidence to be able to deal with whatever comes. Like Yogi’s advice to take the fork, whatever choice you make your experience will help you deal with whatever comes your way.
There will always be someone who will tell you that you have got it wrong and these people will almost always be those who did not have to make the decision. Pay them little heed for these are the Monday morning quarterbacks who have the benefit of hindsight and had no skin in the game. They might be right, they might be wrong, but as long as you made the call as best as you could with the time, knowledge and resource that you had then at least you did something. Learn and move on.
You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take – Michael Jordan
Niki Lauda recalled this quote at Silverstone on Saturday afer Lewis Hamilton had aborted his qualifying lap in Final qualifying at the British Grand Prix thinking that conditions had worsened and that he had pole position in the bag from his previous effort only to find that five others were able to beat his time. Read more…
make a choice and get off the fence; it isn’t that comfortable up there
One of my regular topics here, but rightly so for being able to make a decision, even a poor one, is beyond so many people and seems to be a greater problem when collective thinking is involved as in the case of an organisation’s management. Read more…
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