Because You Cannot Just Stop….
I was having a coffee with a legend this morning. We were discussing how intensely uncomfortable it can feel when you are following your passion instinctively. The decision to ‘go’ with what you just feel to be correct requires courage on a number of levels. Today’s conversation focused on the following question:
“When do you know that you have sufficient information with which to make a critical decision?”
There are layers of context to apply here. Is that obvious to everyone? Let’s skim through some of that context now…
My beliefs.
I’m going to go out on a risky limb here and suggest that trauma from birth lead me to hold fears as I grew, influencing my beliefs about the world, influencing my view of the world in the widest sense. I was a naturally fearful infant and child. I believed in the present and the future, blocking out the past. This leads me now to hold a belief that I am largely alone, making decisions in the now, in a world without order.
My learned decision making style.
I’m 49 years old. I have (roughly) 44 years of conscious decision making under my belt. As a child, I made decisions instinctively, driven by some fairly rudimentary emotional needs. Then, patterns started to develop. Unconsciously, I was registering success and failure rates in getting what I wanted. This continued as I grew, my world got bigger, more complex. My decision making style evolved because I was a middle class kid, growing up in the UK, sheltered from harm. My learned decision making style is unique to me.
Life experiences.
As a young adult, fear led me to avoid commitment, to hold everything as a threat, to push everything away eventually. All the information I needed to make a critical decision was a gut feeling, I had no interest in data, information, trends. I rejected anything formal like school, doing my A-Levels drunk and being amazed that I could still pass the exams! I just believed that I could make anything happen if I worked hard enough.
When I wanted to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot I realised that I lacked a depth in understanding. I was successful in the selection process but the RAF wanted to see me show some backbone. They gave me 12 months to do something interesting, to mature and develop. In typical ‘me’ style, in the space of an evening in the local pub, I committed to doing a solo, un-supported 874 mile charity walk over a UK winter, the London Marathon and a 4-week Atlantic sailing expedition, never having sailed before and lying about that to get on the 3-man crew.
Life in the RAF further cemented my beliefs and rewarded certain behaviours. I was a kid with a terrible educational background, in the middle of the UK’s elite and I was thriving. ‘Straight A’ students were falling out of the training system around me, being ‘chopped’ and having their faces ‘tippexed’ out of our training group photo in the entrance hall. I was able to handle pressure, ruthlessly prioritise and rationalise time.
Being a military pilot is really interesting. The up/down/woops/poop/twiddly-dee of flying the aircraft is just considered second nature. What you are actually paid to be is an information processor and decision maker, often under unthinkable pressures of time and moral and legal ambiguity. Decisions are made because they have to be made, not because you would naturally want to make them and never in a timescale that suits you. We take or orders from a chain of command, always at the weekend, in the middle of the night, and always when it’s raining.
Making critical decisions under pressure induces a whole host of emotions in a cocktail that is unique to you in that moment, but clearly there are some emotions that will be common in most people. The RAF flying training system teaches you, very quickly, that you are never correct and when it is your brain against the physics of aerodynamics, physics always wins. I was therefore very good at receiving unvarnished feedback, dealing with embarrassment, shame, loneliness of command, disappointment and focusing on mission success above self interest. Once you learn that those emotional states are neither positive, nor negative, you’ve won.
The wonderful thing about fully opening the four throttles of a 180 ton military aircraft and accelerating down the runway is that you don’t get much time in which to think if something goes wrong. You cannot just stop! We were taught to use 90% of whatever time you have to think and 10% to decide and do, even if you only have 5 seconds. This works. Taking a deep breath before speaking can settle the nerves and provide the extra clarity of thought. You might only have 10% of the information that you would have normally, without the criticality but guess what? It’s decision time. Waiting for another 5% of information may make your situation a whole lot worse.
We should be reflecting back on why we consider enough information to be enough? Is it a volume of data issue? Some decisions can be made with cold hard data alone, yet if we are honest and listen to our language, are we giving off tell tale signs of an emotion creeping in…”It feels like the data backs this up”, “I believe the data shows this”, “If I’m making a critical decision, I go by the data, not emotion, it feels like the right thing to do”, “When I have the data, I go around the team and check that they are happy, then I decide”.
Understanding your emotional signatures under pressure will help you make timely, efficient, consistent and confident decisions. Trusting yourself to know that decision making needs to be based on time, not on receiving a certain amount of information to justify it’s outcomes or justify yourself to others. You own your time and you own your decisions and the subsequent outcomes. You serve those around you best by being consistent, inclusive and authentic. Waiting to be comfortable is like waiting for Bristol City to win the Premiership…..it might happen…but plate tectonics is quicker.
