PhotoCredit: Doctor's Orders
About three weeks ago I cancelled my trip to New Zealand. It was a business trip. I tend to go out five times a year. I haven’t been there for over a year, haven’t seen my boards or companies in a year, haven’t eaten Bluff oysters in a year. I know!
It wasn’t Bluff oyster season so I was out of luck there anyway. Missing my meetings though, and feeling like I was letting all my teams down, that was a bitter pill to swallow. I made the call because it felt like too great of a risk to travel with the new strains lurking about. I needed to be a good leader. This seemed like the intelligent decision. I have second guessed myself for every day since I cancelled. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, NZ went into lockdown. Yesterday would have been my first board meeting. We cancelled that meeting and have shortened all the other meetings this week. They will all be online. I am not missing a thing. Not Bluff oysters and not my work obligations.
Sometimes big decisions like this go in our favor. Those are the great moments; the genius moments. We get a little smug. We tell a few people in full humble-brag style. Or, if you are like me, we sit on the couch staring at our phones in utter disbelief we called it THAT well.
Then there are the other decisions we make. Most of which we forget or try to forget. The ones where we don’t call it as well. We sell a stock and the price races upwards the next day. We don’t go to a party and we find out that Leo DiCaprio turned up. We decide we need another glass of wine when we have early meetings the next day…
We make good decisions and we make bad decisions. Many outcomes are completely out of our control and we end up right by chance. And wrong by chance. What is important to me is how I make decisions and how I can improve my decision making.
These are my reflections:
The decision I made was instigated by a very clever, sometimes alarmist, friend. I don’t always reach the same conclusions as him but I always listen intently to his rationale.
On the flip side, I didn’t start canvassing a million other people’s opinion. I thought that would just start making the issue muddy. I fact checked with a couple of friends “in the know” and then did my own assessment.
I read a lot and very broadly. I had a more informed view on this matter because of this.
I made my decision through the lens of probability first. I am a VERY intuitive person, I believe deeply in the intuitive process but, I don’t make decisions on intuition if I can make the decision with logic.
I asked myself what the worst-case outcome of each scenario was. The worst case of going would have been infecting my fellow board directors. I was not prepared to take that risk.
My biggest reflection is that my decision was right regardless of what happened in New Zealand. On the available information, I made a tough call and I made it as well as I could. Don’t be afraid to make the hard calls. Make them. Then back yourself.