Setting The Foundation For Good Decision Making

As an organization, Imagine! makes decisions that impact the organization and the people we serve every day. As the CEO of Imagine!, I also have to make decisions that impact the organization and the people we serve every day.

I will admit that sometimes those decisions, both personal and organizational, aren’t the correct decisions. But more often than not they are. I think it is because we have created a solid foundation upon which to base our decisions. We have developed a fertile ground for making the right call at the right time.

I think we make our best decisions when we ask (and discover the answers to) the correct questions before making the final call. Questions such as: “Do we have the resources to support this decision?”; “How much time will implementing this decision take, and do we have that time?’; “Is it the right time to make this decision?”; “How do we measure the success of this decision?”; and “Is a failed outcome necessarily related to the decision?”

Those last two questions are especially important. While we want to determine beforehand what our desired outcomes for a particular decision will be, we need to leave some room for accepting a failed outcome even though the decision was correct. Just because a decision doesn’t result in the expected or desired outcomes doesn’t automatically mean the decision was incorrect. Sometimes it just means that the timing wasn’t right. Or the resources we thought would be available weren’t actually there. Just because a person falls from a horse, it doesn’t mean the decision to go horseback riding was incorrect.

Whatever the case may be in regards to why a decision is or isn’t ultimately proven to be the correct one, we must be able to take what we learned from what didn’t work as a result of one decision and apply those lessons to the next decision(s) we make. If we do that, then really, no decision can be viewed as a failure.

We need to accept that not all the decisions we make will be the correct ones. We need to be forgiving of ourselves and others if a decision doesn’t produce the desired outcome, but we need to pay attention to what didn’t work so we don’t make the same selection again. If we can make that happen, then we will continue to operate on a strong foundation for making the right decisions at the right time, and accepting, acknowledging, and moving forward when we don’t make the right decisions.

Then again, what do I know?