Readings
For a Difficult Decision
Some decisions are difficult because we lack facts. Most are difficult because we already know what we would rather not do.
- Theme
- decision
- Occasion
- Before a decision that cannot be deferred
We are deciding without enough.
There will not be enough.
Let us name what we are actually choosing between,
and not the version that makes us comfortable.
Who is not in this room.
Who will carry this if we are wrong.
What are we avoiding by deliberating longer.
What would we decide if it cost us nothing, and why does that answer differ.
Let us decide.
Let us say plainly that we decided, and on what.
And let us stay near enough to see what follows.
Responsive form
| Leader | All |
|---|---|
| We are deciding without enough. | There will not be enough. |
| Who is not in this room? | Who will carry this if we are wrong? |
| Let us decide, and say plainly that we decided. | And let us stay near enough to see what follows. |
When to use it
At the point where a decision has to be made and the information you wanted has not arrived. Before a vote, a hiring, a release, a refusal, a diagnosis of what to do about a person or a system.
It is short and can be read silently in a meeting without anyone noticing.
What it does
It does not help you decide. It is worth being clear about that, because most decision aids quietly promise resolution and this one does not.
What it does is interrupt four specific evasions.
The first two lines close off the hope of sufficiency. Almost every difficult decision is accompanied by the sense that a little more information would make it easy. Usually it would not; usually the difficulty is a conflict between goods, and no fact settles it.
The middle lines put the absent parties into the room. The single most reliable defect in decisions about technology is that the people affected are not present when the decision is made, and their absence is rarely deliberate. It is structural, and naming it is the only cheap remedy available.
The line about avoidance is uncomfortable on purpose. Deliberation can be a form of delay wearing better clothes, and the cost of delay usually falls on somebody other than the deliberators.
The line about cost is the sharpest. If your answer changes when it is free, you have identified the price you are being paid to reach your current conclusion.
What it asks afterwards
Three things, all in the last lines.
Decide. Indecision is a decision with worse documentation.
Say plainly that you decided, and on what basis. Record the reasoning, including the part that was uncomfortable, so that a later reader can tell the difference between a bad outcome and a bad decision.
And stay near enough to see what follows. The characteristic modern failure is to decide and then leave, so that the consequences arrive for someone who was not there and cannot trace them back.
What it does not claim
It does not claim that careful decisions turn out well. They frequently do not.
It does not offer absolution. Nothing here makes you less responsible for what happens, and it is not intended to.
It does not invoke anything. No guidance arrives. The reading is a set of questions arranged so that they are hard to skip, and its only power is that you will have heard them before you acted.
Questions to sit with
- What would I decide if nobody would ever know it was me?
- Who is absent from this decision, and how did they come to be absent?