Decision-making
Leadership teams rarely get the evidence they would like. The useful question is not how to remove the uncertainty, but which parts of it actually matter.
Dr Yakubu Balogun
Founder & Principal Consultant · Priscient Ideas
Most significant decisions are made with incomplete information. That is not a failure of analysis. It is the normal condition of running an organisation, and waiting for the evidence to be complete is itself a decision with a cost.
What separates a good decision from a lucky one is whether the reasoning was written down. If you can say what you assumed, what you relied on and what would have to change for you to think differently, then the decision can be revisited properly when circumstances move. If you cannot, every review becomes an argument about memory.
In practice we find three questions do most of the work. Which of these uncertainties would actually change the answer? What would it cost to reduce that one, and how long would it take? And if we cannot reduce it, what would we need to watch for afterwards?
The rest of the uncertainty can usually be acknowledged and set aside. Teams often spend months reducing uncertainty that was never going to change the decision, because it was the uncertainty that felt most uncomfortable rather than the one that mattered.
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Peace Bakare · Head of IT & Engineering
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Most organisations produce more reporting than they use. Retiring the surplus is usually more valuable than adding another dashboard.
Dr Yakubu Balogun · Founder & Principal Consultant
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Tell us what your organisation is facing. If we are the right team to help, we will say how. If we are not, we will say that too.
