TBM 260: The Thoughtful HIPPO

Top-down decision-making is underrated.

Teams often desperately want leaders to make decisions and establish meaningful constraints. They may not want a leader to dictate the how, but they DO want someone with formal influence and authority to take a stand, take options off the table, and take responsibility. But the big challenge is that when this is needed the most is when it is hardest. Here's why.

Imagine three vacation situations:

Existential Crisis

You're on a dream vacation, and a natural disaster strikes. You evacuate immediately—no questions asked. You are happy to be alive.

Perfect Vacation

You're having the perfect vacation. Everything is going as planned. You decide to try new things and explore. Even if a choice doesn't work out, it won't ruin your vacation. Things just go your way.

Slowly Deteriorating Vacation

But now imagine one of those vacations that starts deteriorating. Things start well, but small issues start cropping up. None of the problems are catastrophic, but your vacation gradually worsens. But now you're a bit stuck—you're constantly weighing whether to keep your plans, make minor adjustments, or overhaul the whole trip. Each small issue gets you increasingly bothered, but you keep hoping things will improve. Then, you start descending into a never-ending cycle of what-ifs and trade-offs. So do your travel companions—everyone has their opinion on how to turn things around.

What's going on in the deteriorating vacation example?

1. The ambiguity makes it harder to assess the situation.

2. There's less pressure to make a quick decision.

3. It is easy to get mired and bogged down in perceived complex trade-offs.

4. A slow decline leads to denial, wishful thinking, and defensiveness.

5. You're afraid of making things worse!

6. Everyone has time to develop a strong perspective on how to fix the problem.

So precisely when we need good decisions (and have some time to make them), we are prone to analysis paralysis. Leaders are humans, too! This is why when things are slowly deteriorating, they are more prone to Tetris playing and trying to juggle trade-offs to keep all their options open.

One of the big challenges is that we're taught to weigh all the options and consider all the trade-offs. We believe that finding the perfect solution is possible if we think hard enough and ask enough incisive questions. We want to navigate our way to that win-win solution. 

The antidote to this is realizing that the slide is happening, realizing that there are vastly diminishing returns with the trade-off Tetris, realizing that the analysis isn't necessarily helping, and deciding to some all-encompassing enabling constraints. The very nature of these constraints means that you typically need someone with formal authority to draw the line.

When I mention this to leaders, they often have three responses:

1.  They expect their teams to push back and make these decisions

2.  They don't want to disempower their team

3.  They can't make these decisions without knowing all the trade-offs

I think that in Good Times, these concerns are valid. However, when times get harder, and things deteriorate, you cannot necessarily expect people to speak up and push back. They may be concerned about their job. They may be caught in the same analysis paralysis. Normal views on empowerment take on a different shape in these situations. The primary way to empower the team is to help reduce cognitive load, not leave all the mess up to them.

Finally, it's important to question whether having all that information (and understanding all of those trade-offs) will make a difference. What is the 80/20? 

When you boil it down, people with formal authority in a company are just like anyone. In these slowly deteriorating situations, they have the same analysis paralysis and are as worried as the next person to make the wrong move.

What you don't want to become is the bottleneck.

And this is when making the right kind of decision matters. Asking to have veto power on every project or reviewing everything is likely overkill. But force ranking your priorities, actively deprioritizing a goal, or establishing clear constraints can be a huge lift for a team.