The Best Decisions: Those We Must Live With

Re-posted by permission:
http://marxsoftware.blogspot.com/2010/12/best-decisions-are-those-we-must-live.html

We have all been the victims of others' poor decisions. This is especially painful when we, and not those making the decisions, are the victims. I have seen many times in my career a particularly bad idea was implemented because the person making the decision had no relevant experience to understand the consequences of his or her decision. These same people often do not have to implement the poor decision and therefore do not learn from their mistakes. In this post, I look at ways to reduce or avoid this cause/effect.

Most decision-makers (managers, leads, customers) want to succeed and try to make good decisions. The problem is that they may lack a full understanding of the total costs, risks, and the unintended consequences of a particular decision. It is sometimes sufficient to point out the total costs, the risks and the potential unintended consequences of the decision to head the poor decision off. Unfortunately, expressed risks, costs, and unintended consequences are often dismissed as overstated or not likely to be incurred.

Help or Allow the Decision Maker to Taste the Idea

A group of fellow developers and I stopped a particularly bad idea from being implemented when we helped the management team make the decision to visualize the true costs (time and schedule) of the decision. As they envisioned themselves implementing the onerous approach, they realized what we had been trying to tell them: their idea sounded good at first, but it was very inefficient when considering the realities of the tools we had at the time. Only when they pictured themselves waiting on this tool to run did they understand how inefficient their idea really was.

It is more effective when the decision maker has to personally experience the negative consequences of a particular idea…helping them imagine it is the next best thing. If imagining the consequences of the decision is not enough, it may be possible to implement a solution on a trial basis without a back out plan. This allows only minimal loss to be incurred until the decision maker realizes the downside. The actual experience or realistic imagining can help make the costs, risks, and unintended consequences more "real" or more concrete to the decision maker. It’s like a simulation exercise.

Enlist Recognized Experts

If the significance of a decision warrants it, it may be advisable to bring in a colleague who is a recognized authority or expert in the particular area to provide credibility to your argument. Such outside influence will be most effective if the person brought in has real life experience with something similar to the decision being made.

Recognize Your Own Deficiencies

It is also important to realize that everyone makes mistakes and everyone is limited based on lack of experience or knowledge in certain areas. Especially in the case where peers do not seem to agree with our position, we should ask ourselves, "Am I the one with the bad idea here?"

Leave the Situation

In the most severe cases of a pending poor decision, when all else fails, it may be advisable to remove oneself from the situation entirely. If the results of the decision are highly likely to lead to significant negative consequences that the decision maker does not have to deal with, it may be best for the potentially affected developer to make sure that he or she will not be the victim of the decision either. Removing oneself from the situation may be as easy as working on a different part of the project.

It's Easier to Choose Poorly When It Impacts Someone Else

The decisions that I have been most disappointed with and most frustrated with in my career have generally been made by people who don't have to live with the consequences of the decision. It's all too easy to avoid the effort involved in researching an issue and thinking about the wide range of choices and associated consequences (obvious and unintended) when one knows that he or she is not the one who suffers from being not putting in the requisite labor.

When we don't have to live with the consequences of our decisions, it changes what we think is the best decision. I contend that we will generally make the best decisions when we have a stake in the outcome. When we envision how we would implement a decision ourselves, we start to realize more fully how good or bad the decision is.

Conclusion

There are few things more frustrating to a software developer than being the victim of particularly poor decisions whose negative consequences are obvious to everyone but the decision maker. Assuming that the decision maker really has the organization's or client's best interests at heart, one important step to helping that person make a better decision is to help that person better understand how the organization or client is severely and negatively impacted by that decision. In cases where the decision maker only cares about himself or herself, it probably won't matter how bad the consequences are if he or she will not be affected by those consequences.

I think most people would agree that decisions and plans are best implemented when the people who must implement them take ownership of the decision. Therefore, it's fairly obvious that decision makers should get buy-in from the would-be owners of the decision's implementation. When decision makers don't get buy-in from those implementing the decision, the implementation may be found lacking. Getting buy-in from the implementers of a decision is also important because the very process of doing so may help the decision maker make a better, more informed decision.

Posted by Dustin Marx at 8:54 AM on Dec 27, 2010

ZDT Author’s Comments:
We have selected what we consider the key issues here to shorten the size of the post. For the full article, please see the credit line above.

A different POV.