How to become more decisive in an effective way

The nightmare scenario for most of us is, when flapping our hands in anguish, we wail, ‘I don’t know what to do’.

This is most common when we do not have enough information, we do not understand where we are going and we do not know what we want to achieve. Management consultants typically will ask their client, ‘What do you want to achieve?’

Once you can answer that, decision making is easier (did I say easy? It is never that). The real key is to ask about every decision you make: ‘Is this decision consistent with the strategy and does it make the strategy more likely to happen successfully?’

How to create strategic options and be nimble footed

It is human nature to want to take the A–B quickest route and have only one option strategically. It seems to me, that having a plan B, plan C and even plan D in your back pocket is sensible. Our minds thrive on choice. It is with choice that our mettle as decision makers is tested.

Most designers offer a small range of proposals to their clients so they do not feel they are being railroaded. Psychology says, when offered a choice of three, the client will be drawn to one, so the beginning of a sale is achieved.

Having more than one option allows you to explore the way different strategic options play out. It encourages what a boss of mine called ‘supple thinking’. Me? I am with Mark Twain: ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.’

Decision maker or strategic decision maker – how to distinguish between them

We make decisions the whole time: ‘Shall I finish this section or go and have a glass of wine?’ Wine wins after careful thought, but it is not a strategic decision. A strategic decision might be, ‘I have half of this book to write and the deadline looms. What do I do?’ Answer: cancel all appointments I can, get up at 5.30 am. Put that wine away. Lubricate my mind instead with some Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Antifragile – both great books; British journalist and author Bryan Appleyard called him ‘the hottest thinker in the world’ and he sure makes you think about uncertainty and risk). Now that recipe is strategic.

There are other things about strategic thinking:

• We need to be comfortable about looking into the future and guessing how things might pan out. It is highly unlikely that we will guess everything right, but being prescient is not the prize. The prize is making ourselves think creatively and stray into the unknown.
• There is a distinction between the strategic roles of a director and a manager. A very effective manager I know said, smilingly, ‘Yeah, managers do the work.’ The latter is focussed on the immediate present and the near future. The former will have longer horizons.
• There is also a distinction between an executive director and non-executive director. The latter is, or should be, focussed entirely on strategy and risk. They were described recently as the real ‘Guardians of the Treasure’.
• The role of the chairperson is to manage the board, of course, but also to help focus on the long term and drive the business towards opportunities. The chairperson is the ultimate strategic decision maker and facilitator of decision making. Importantly, as a non-executive, they will bring strategic perspective to a business because they are, typically, exposed to a variety of business scenarios.

Strategic focus on three big issues – how to prime yourself to think strategically about any business issue

Beware the tailor or couturier who seizes something from the rail, saying, ‘You’ll look wonderful in this’ because one size does not fit all. But, experience shows that focus on these three issues will help you construct strategic parameters around any business.

How to understand why you are, where you are and defining where you want to be

I sympathise with modern executives, I really do. There is an electric speed of change, jostling crowds of competitors, awkward employees. In the giddy whirligig of the 21st century, knowing where you are and where you are heading is not easy. So, whoa! Slow down. Stop. Think. Like Terry Pratchett wrote in I Shall Wear Midnight: ‘If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are and, if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.’

• Fix a gaze on yourself now in this very moment of time. Examine where you are and how you got here. Are you happy with where you are? Is it a strong or a weak place?
• Now examine what you did right and what you did wrong. The most important thing in business and, indeed, in life, is to be honest with yourself and learn from what you have done. The word failure is one I am uncomfortable with. I am much more at ease with the idea of things not quite working out as you had expected.
• What do you have that makes you special? Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School said: ‘Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage.’ So, how are you different and where does your uniqueness lie?
• What decisions made over the past two years have been strategic ones? Not many of us review our history of decision making. We should. And we should especially consider how many decisions made were non-strategic, namely taken in isolation from the bigger picture. History is littered with thinking and decision making that simply is not joined up.
• Where could you be if you make all the right calls? What would happen if you created the strategy and it went perfectly? What would have happened if you made better decisions in the past? Explore what-ifs because they will tell you a lot about what you have collectively believed was the best you could have done.

At a conference recently, I heard an inspirational speaker berating his large corporate audience (from an organisation with very big brand leaders in a mature static market) for talking about only 5 per cent growth. ‘Why not 500 per cent growth?’ he shouted. ‘Oops! There goes another pig in airman’s googles looping the loop,’ I thought. Be ambitious, yes, but stay real.

How to create a forum for debating strategy and areas of change

When I talk about the trajectory of strategy development and the decision-making framework, I hear cries of ‘jargon and gobbledegook’. Good rebuke. I will try again.

We need to make strategic decisions and develop our strategies with our feet squarely on the ground but our plans need be bold and radical not timorous and safe. And I like the word trajectory because it is about taking off and going higher.

To get everyone around you in the right frame of mind, you need an occasional discussion forum about any changes you have noticed anywhere (not just your own market) that might make you all think a bit and reflect on underlying reasons for such changes. The aim is to become change-aware.

Main drivers to change – how to find, understand and lever them

At school, I had a History master who used to intone gravely, ‘The pendulum always swings back.’ So, good kings become bad kings, are then revived as good kings and are then vilified again by academics. What comes up goes down. A while back, in a knee- (or rather tummy-) jerk reaction to an excess of low-carb-evangelism, pies made a return. Baking is in for now (or it might be in the past tense by the time you read this). Gin is back. And here is the one I like best of all – the return of the hacking-immune electric typewriter. There are cycles, trends and swings everywhere.

But change is a norm. And it always was, even in 450 BC when the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: ‘The only thing that is constant is change.’

The key drivers are always:

• Economic – we have price paradigms being broken by new players (often from Asia), recession, and inflation. In the 1976 film All the President’s Men, about the fall of President Richard Nixon, a great line was created: ‘Follow the money’. If in doubt, do that. Money is very vocal.
• Structure of market – the most interesting driver – and alarming if you are on the wrong end of it – is the creation of a new business model, e.g. Direct Line created a new insurance model that excluded brokers. Market structures have been transformed by e-commerce. Look at Amazon. Well, if you had a bookshop, just how would you compete?
• Innovation – the biggest impact will always be ‘new, improved’. There was a new drug called Zantac that, within seven years of its launch in 1981, was the biggest prescription drug in the world. A new TV series like Game of Thrones changes the whole way we look at TV now and the media hegemony. All leaders have feet of clay when an innovator has a great idea.
• Competition – the cost of entry has never been lower, thanks to the internet. You can have an idea on day one and, a week later (or less), launch it virtually for nothing. So, the number of competitors increases and the market drivers are towards consolidation. The best chance most entrants have is to sell at a premium early and start again, which is disruptive, but it is also very interesting. Because the people who stand to suffer most are the leaders, who get increasingly heavier as they carry more and more baggage, bureaucracy and bemusement as to what is really going on.
• Social changes – all the time the trends are reversing. Rail travel rockets (‘Oops, Lord Beeching – are you sure about that strategic decision you made?’); smoking is banned in public spaces (and a generation’s habit changes overnight); alcohol consumption is currently in drastic decline – especially amongst 16–25 year olds; and drug usage falls dramatically, too. We live in counterintuitive times. (But watch that pendulum.)

How to become a student of change

Become a student of change in the way you think and look at things every day, not just when you have embarked on strategic thinking. That is what marks out a leader.

• Reading – become a voracious reader of papers and books that explore the general subject. Kahneman, Dennett, Taleb, Ridley, Gladwell, Levitt and Dubner all have something useful to say about the changes in our lives. The last five are the best reads.
• Watching – get out into shops, at conferences, at airports, stations or football matches – wherever crowds are – and watch the way people behave.
• Learning to be a contrarian – as a way of thinking, a mindset that starts from a default response of ‘not necessarily’ when presented with a proposition is a pretty healthy one. I am not suggesting you become disagreeably argumentative, merely that you take nothing at face value and you are not frightened to debate.

How to anticipate change cycles and swinging pendulums

Change happens erratically, not in straight lines, and, as we have said, pendulums swing back. Your job is to know how to be ahead of the curve. Reading, watching and asking, ‘Are you sure about that?’ will help you do this. There is a bit of the rebel in us all, so never say, ‘People will never do x again’, just because the trends suggest they will not.

How to identify what levers you control and how to operate them

I recall a long time ago the toy industry had a somewhat arcane structure of trade discounts. No one really liked them and they seemed to belong to history rather than common sense. A new MD was appointed to a company called Palitoy. He was a bright and opinionated man, who decided to take on the industry, saying ‘I’m going to change this market’. Predictably, the market gobbled him up and spat him out. It was not a battle worth fighting. A good news story is the one about Greggs and the real food movement evoked by the smell of fresh baking. Their slogan is ‘always fresh, always tasty’ – not bad. It started in 1951 with a shop in Newcastle and now has over 1,500, it employs over 19,000 and it turns over in excess of £800 million. The levers they have controlled brilliantly are freshness, taste, price and a shrewd insight into their consumers.

Like Greggs, identify what you can control and start tweaking the levers until you find a mix that works. Just do not try and take on your industry; worry about your consumers instead.

Zig when others zag

Reconciling yourself to going in the opposite direction to others requires real strength of will. There has been a lot written about the dangers of being part of the herd. Read Michael Lewis’ book Big Short about the US property boom that, in the end, was not a boom at all and the corrupt collateralised debt options that were sold on the back of it. A small group of contrarians escaped the herd disease.

Andy Weiss, writing for Digital Pivot, produced this little gem:

Client: ‘We want a Facebook program.’

Agency: ‘Why?’

Client: ‘Because there are a lot of people on Facebook and all our competitors are there.’

‘In which case,’ Andy howls, ‘do something different.’

How to create momentum

You know about momentum? It is when people say, ‘We’re on a roll.’ Well, I do not know. No real idea. No one does. Money to throw at it helps, but less than it did. A popular cause helps – polar bears did a lot for climate change activists. Coca-Cola making loyalists angry with ‘new Coke’ did it. We are learning more as we watch things go viral that seem trivial (Fenton, the deer-chasing dog, for instance: www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=cr&ei=lZoUU-_QM4mShgf-u4GACg#q=youtube fenton) but it is hard to predict.

What is clear is that, in a social media, if you want momentum, be different, be angry, be funny, be attractive, be outrageous, be astonishing or use pets, children or people in embarrassing situations. Make people laugh, cry or gasp. Get an emotional reaction and your strategy may become a cause.

How to work with those new factors in the decision-making game

In a changing world, one in which health and safety and political correctness are prominent features of our lives, our strategic behaviour will be modified by these. Environmental issues, gender equality, multiculturalism, whistleblowing as a mandatory requirement (which is somewhat counter to centuries of concepts like tribal loyalty) and, finally, transparency in decision making, all these inform and transform the way strategic decisions are made. The world is a better place, but some of these factors, unfamiliar to some leaders, need to be better understood. The last, in particular – transparency of process – is tough for those more used to fixing things in private, behind closed doors. Today, following the example of Master Chef on TV, everything needs to happen in open view.

Making transparency work

One of the merits of transparency is our behaviour in reaching a strategic decision and our identification of drivers of change will have to contain more discipline. We shall need to create a decision trail in which the various factors leading to our decision are clearly expressed and transparently debated. Had this discipline always existed in the businesses subjected to the inquisitions of the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster, they might, from time to time, have suffered from less severe a roasting. As a start, ensure a new, transparent, properly recorded process is used. Explain that there is no off-the-record stuff allowed.

How to unblock a team’s way of thinking

The most frustrating thing that happens in business life is to have a roomful of bright, expensive people operating below their potential, being cautious and uncreative.

Avoid this by having a clear agenda, all participants well briefed and prepared, a short meeting – never more than three hours, except in exceptional situations – well and good humouredly chaired and with, the next day, clear, simple and comprehensive minutes. And make sure everyone has a say and that no one dominates and no one is silent.

The principle of simplicity

The key is to make your strategy and any activity in which you are involved simple, clear and radical. Steve Jobs, on being asked what drove his thinking, replied: ‘That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because, once you get there, you can move mountains.’