How Leaders Can Make Better Decisions

How Leaders Can Make Better Decisions

By Mike W Bell

Today's business challenges cannot be resolved by logic and knowledge alone. Only leaders with wisdom can learn to make better decisions when faced with the conditions of what Doug Engelbart calls: "complexity multiplied by urgency."

As the evidence below shows, leaders are faced with a real challenge of how to make better decisions in a world that is continually changing. It seems that the tools and approaches they have learned are not adequate. They belong to a slower, simpler time but do not work well today. They are anchored in an out-dated worldview that sees people and organizations as machines.

As a result many leaders do not understand what is needed to make better decisions and take more effective action.

How do we best decide what is the most effective action?

"In an increasingly dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable world, it is simply no longer possible for anyone to figure it all out at the top" Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline."

What Peter Senge is describing here as dynamic, interdependent and unpredictable is one way to think about complexity. It was Karl Popper who popularised the distinction between problems that are clock and those that are clouds. Clock problems relate to mechanical systems that are predictable and, if they break down, no matter how complicated, the cause and effect relationships can be understood and the broken parts replaced.

Most big problems in business are not 'clocks' however, they are more like clouds; they are complex - made up of myriad interconnected parts where the cause and effect relationship are almost impossible to understand (like a weather system) and predicting the outcomes of changes is very difficult and can have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

"Many change programmes fail - and the traditional assessment of failure is 75% of the attempts - often because they do not take into account that they are working with a living system and not a machine." - Professor Keith Grint, Professor of Public Leadership & Management at Warwick University, UK.

What is suggested here is that many decisions fail because they assume that the organization, market or ecosystem is a machine and complicated rather than a living system and complex. Complex systems do not yield to IQ, logic or deduction.

An additional challenge presented by human organizations is that they are also adaptive. They learn from past behaviours and change how they respond to a similar stimulus in the future. This adds to the difficulty in predicting outcomes with any degree of certainty.

In summary, how leaders can make better decisions is by understanding how complexity affects their business.

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest eBook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_W_Bell


http://EzineArticles.com/?How-Leaders-Can-Make-Better-Decisions&id=6766369