Deciding is not an event – it is a process
Some folks, I have learned, like to make quick decisions and then move swiftly into the action phase. They are by nature action-oriented. For them, the process of deciding what to do is simply something to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Action is where all the fun is.
You will of course easily see where the potential problem with this plan lies. Acting on a quick or pre-made decision may work in a static decision situation – but only so long as the decision about what to do is itself sound. These are two pretty important conditions. While some decision situations are conveniently static for near-term practical purposes, you still need to have a sound decision and action plan in hand. Reality rarely behaves as planned.
The safest approach for most decision situations is to assume a dynamic situation – one that is likely to change significantly as you move through the action phase. This means that you must somehow address the situation and its likely progression as part of your decision-making process. You also need to be quite sure that your decision itself remains sound, including actions that flow from your decision.
To protect yourself from a flawed decision or action plan, it is usually wise for your most important situations to develop some sort of escape route should the situation not behave as you anticipate. Having such a backup plan in mind or in place before commencing your actions can save you from some serious problems later on.
Always include figuring out what might go wrong
Even though you may feel that your current decision and its action plan are both sound and likely to work, you may want to delay a bit and try to see what might go wrong with either one. Virtually all important decisions and plans have at least a few ways in which things might go seriously astray. This is how life works for most everyone.
Figuring out what might go wrong is typically not easy. It requires having some sense for what the future might bring into play. Predicting the future as you know is extremely difficult. The future seems always to find some ways to misbehave – and so often without warning.
There is a better way here. Since reliably predicting the future is generally difficult-to-impossible, you can instead adapt your decision and action plans to the future as it unfolds. This approach is what I have referred to as “dynamic decision-making”.
You would seek to focus your decision and action plan on a short enough period ahead that nothing major and unexpected is likely to happen during this period. You would plan to revisit both your decision and its action plan at the end of this current period. But then you would be armed with valuable knowledge of what the future has just brought into your reality and, based on this knowledge, what is most likely to happen during the next period.
Watching the future unfold is the key
Except in rather extreme situations, the future flows slowly enough to accommodate such a stepwise or dynamic decision process. It may be a bit tricky to decide on how long your steps should be, but even this you can adjust as you go to see what length of time works best.
The power here is in letting the future tell you what it is up to as you move along with your dynamic-decision and its also-dynamic set of actions. You need only plan firmly ahead for the relatively short duration of your steps. Barring some major unforeseen event occurring, you should be able to keep your decision-and-action sets moving along nicely.
Note that, while you may have a relatively unchanging end-goal firmly in mind, your path to that goal will nearly always have a number of possible routes. These are what you can use to adapt each step to the unfolding situation. A changing situation however may even lead to adjusting your end-goal to take advantage of some newly-visible situation aspects.
For those eager-to-get-moving folks who have already “made up their mind” on what to do in their situation, this stepwise process is exactly what they want. They can get into action quickly but with much-reduced risks. The only downside is that it requires some number of steps to keep the decision and its actions in sync with whatever reality actually shows up.
