Currently, there is much talk about decisions. Allegedly, they are important. You have to be able to make decisions. It is the central duty of a CEO to decide. Which is the better way to decide: based on brains or based on gut feeling?
And there is talk about wrong decisions. In retrospect, courageous decisions are often considered totally wrong, even if they had been met with tremendous jubilation at the time they were made. Regardless of the fact that nobody can possibly say what the result would have been if the decision had been made differently and, as it seems afterwards, correctly.
As you can see, it is not easy to make decisions, even though everybody has to make up his or her mind about something or other in life. Should I stay with my partner – or even marry him or her? Do I want children? Will I ever in life move house? How to prepare for old age?
But back to management:
I used to follow the old management teaching that you should prepare for good decisions by “collecting information and evaluating it, and then come to your reasonable decision based on this process”. And since I always wanted to decide well, I collected and evaluated information very diligently and industriously. The more information and evaluations I had at my disposal, the more “wise” I felt – and the harder it got to decide. Too many arguments on far too many different levels made life hard for me.
Now, I no longer believe in decisions based on rational processes. By definition, a decision is something based on uncertainties. Now if you deduce decisions from an excellent information-based concept, then that only means you transfer the problem from one place to another. The scenario of an information-based concept may make the decision rationally deducible and very simple. But is the underlying scenario really correct?
This “excellent” information-based concept, which is perhaps based on a huge effort of manpower and knowledge, is, after all, itself again based on assumptions. These assumptions have sometimes been generated by people whose thought processes are very complicated and theoretical. And they, again, had to decide in a scenario of uncertainties. For instance, when it came to the question what to assume as basis for future developments and causal theories. When we tackle really difficult themes (which is mostly the case when we make decisions), there is no absolute truth, neither in the detail nor globally.
All you mostly do is base your decisions on certainties and alleged truths that were probably processed at a huge cost and with profound scientific background, but in the end they are nothing but worthless models. And you cannot make a statement about the results of logically correct conclusions based on wrong assumptions. They can be either right or wrong.
It is like building a house in a certain place in the middle of the ocean. Naturally, this is not possible. The house would be driven away by the waves. A brilliant manager would then build a swimming island, but ignore or forget the problem of drifting. Then he will build his house on the most beautiful place of the island.
And then he will know for certain where exactly his house is situated. However, he does not know where the island will drift to.
That is why I no longer believe in decisions based on knowledge or rational concepts. Your activities and behaviour must be determined by values. It must not have cost a lot and consequently be based on mostly totally worthless certainties. Sometimes, it might be helpful to turn to “swarm intelligence” or “crowd sourcing”, or fortunate intuition. But that is all it can be.
And it is probably better to build a house on the ocean (ship) than first build an artificial island and then erect a house on it. Because it is easier to keep a ship on course by permanently staying on the alert than an island in the centre of which you have built a perfect house. Especially if you cannot see the boundaries of the island if you are sitting in the house.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” ~Albert Einstein
I found that citation in twitter. Well, I guess our Einstein was correct again. Even when we are talking about decisions.
P.S.
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I also wrote about decisions (Entscheiden) in my private website duerre.de, though from another angle.
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