Intention & Patience: Carefully Curate Your Decision Architecture

Are you giving your greatest decisions the time they deserve? Short-term decisions are easy—they fit into neat timelines with clear metrics. But when it comes to the decisions that will most significantly impact your company's long-term future, you need to be willing to think differently, break the rules, and allow ideas to evolve. The best leaders know that patience and a bit of chaos have the greatest benefit. If you’re ready to rethink how you plan for the future, I’ll show you how to intentionally curate your company’s decision architecture to create the greatest long-term value. Let’s go to work. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Patience is Key: Long-term decision-making requires patience, allowing ideas to develop and evolve without the pressure of immediate results.
2. Embrace Cognitive Friction: Introducing and managing cognitive friction—deliberately challenging and deconstructing ideas—enhances decision-making and prepares teams for real-world challenges.
3. Flexible Decision Architecture: Successful long-term strategies are built on a flexible, less rigid decision-making process that encourages creativity, experimentation, and non-linear thinking.
4. Intentional Curation of Ideas: Curating ideas with intention, even when they seem illogical or irrational, can lead to innovative solutions that redefine your organization’s future.
5. Avoid Over-Transparency: In long-term planning, being too transparent about desired outcomes can stifle creativity and lead to groupthink. Instead, allow space for new pathways and ideas to emerge organically.

Transcript

Hey, it's Chris Mailander. This is A-ha with Chris Mailander and this is the last episode in this series. There are now 17. Each one of these episodes has been designed with the intentional purpose of being a short point of inspiration or provocation for how you think about your own decision-making. I hope it's proven to be a useful tool as you're in the car or running on the treadmill. What you now have is something that are bite-sized intensives that can create a point of reflection in your own mind: “I might want to approach this issue in a different way,” or “Here's some guardrails that I can use.” 

I'm excited to announce another podcast will soon launch. It is focused on interviewing individuals that I find particularly interesting. They have faced their own critical moments in decision-making. These are the kinds of folks that we want to learn from. We want to understand their reflections about what they could have done better in the past, as well as how they capitalize on particular decisions and opportunities as they have arisen. These are the sorts of decisions that happen behind closed doors and in private moments, and that you don't typically get the opportunity to observe, study, or hear from. This is an opportunity to go deeper. I'm particularly excited about what's coming down the pike. 

For today, and as this last episode, I want to talk about a line of decision-making that is a bit more diverse. I think this type of decision-making has tremendous asset value for those organizations which can implement this. Typically, it is easier to make decisions which are on a shorter timeline. It is easier to make decisions that are required within the next week, the next month, or next quarter because we know what the “decision architecture” is. We know the variables for how we are going to measure success, whether it's financially, operationally, strategically, or our competitive state. We know precisely what the timeline is. Therefore, all the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. It's also where a lot of organizations become extraordinarily efficient, because these decisions then start to develop a routine and rhythm. 

Conversely, what these organizations then come to lack is the ability to create a decision architecture for longer range decisions – those that are going to take six months, a year, 3 years, or 5 years down the road. These are the types of decisions where they will need to be much more creative, innovative, irrational, and even illogical. In fact, you want to create an environment in which people have the opportunity to make non-logical correlations between distinct ideas. You want to create hybrid vigor, which is bringing together two different systems, or “atoms”, or ideas, and as a product of that, create something which is significantly greater in value. What is created is something that has new tendencies and new patterns. 

Most organizations I work with do not focus on this. They do not curate these types of diverse or unique decision architectures as an intentional practice. They'll put an annual number out there, or a market share position in the long distance, etc., but then it is kind of just left there in hope that you do in fact hit that number in the long run. 

The key ingredient to creating a foundational layer of long-range decision-making is patience. This is about the patient curation of ideas, allowing people to play with those ideas,  again in a very intentional way, but in a manner of intentionally being illogical, irrational, creative, innovative, exploring, experimenting and failing, and dissenting. 

There's a couple of techniques that you want to integrate into this curation of a decision architecture for long-range objectives. One is being very clear about time. When we have finite timelines, our decision architecture becomes much more well-defined, for better or for worse. When we have longer timelines, we can be more creative and innovative.  

The second ingredient after time is transparency. There are times when we want to be very transparent about how we are making decisions, what outcomes are expected, and so forth. However, it is a mistake in this long-range decision-making architecture to be too transparent about what you identify as the outcomes, financially-speaking, strategically-speaking, or a from a market share perspective. For example, we have discussed that in prior episodes that at the national and global stage there have been major failures at times when an executive leader pre-defined the outcome they are seeking. What happens then is that the team lines up behind that pre-defined outcome (and the strategy that leads to it), instead of stepping back to architect the best strategy going forward… that's what “groupthink” does to us. Instead, in this case, we want to create an environment where we're much more opaque, and that allows us the freedom to create and think in new ways – to define new outcomes and new pathways. 

The final ingredient that I think is particularly essential to this foundational form of decision-making within an organization for the long term is around cognitive friction. This is distinct from friction in the sense of acrimony between the team -- yelling, shouting, aggressive timelines, “heads down” type of working, etc. -- that is oftentimes endemic with routinized, regular forms of decision-making, like when you are leveraged, or there's been a trigger point or where something has changed such as a crisis or a market share shift. In these types of instances, people then take more immediate, friction-oriented steps in order to quickly serve the outcomes they desire. 

“Cognitive friction” is something different. I love it as a tool or technique in the mix focused on creating friction between logical ideas. What we are doing is taking regular patterns and regular frameworks for decision-making and blowing them up. Intentionally. We are curating this in a way where we say we need to take this apart, blow it up, and then rebuild it. 

What we're looking for in this instance is an improvement in the analysis, improvements in how a team makes decisions and debates, and what the lines of argumentation are. This process of cognitive friction allows us the opportunity to see how a team and its members perceive, react, and think under different conditions. What we are also doing is preconditioning them for how they will respond when actually in a “live fire” event -- when the critical moment is actually in front of us. They will have been preconditioned for how they come to respond and behave in those instances. By that point in time, they will have a game plan. There will be a playbook that will be built for how to deal with this situation. 

But the long road for getting there requires patience in intentionally setting up the framework for a looser decision-making architecture that favors friction, chaos, experimentation, non-linear pathways, and not predetermining or biasing the process by setting up the desired outcomes or the potential strategy for getting there too soon. 

Factor this in, as you think about your longer range decision-making. This is the request for this episode: In your own organization, have you intentionally curated a decision architecture that properly addresses these longer range issues? 

These are the kind of issues which are going to reshape what products and services you're able to offer. 

These are also going to reshape, most importantly, your ecosystem and your role within an ecosystem -- that is your partners, your vendors, your relationships, the people that come together with you, that you both want to grow and evolve with so that it is the strongest ecosystem you can be part of. You then create tremendous value within that evolved ecosystem. How do you create such an ecosystem? It's not through a terribly logical process that is finite in its duration or has a lot of rigid rules. You do it through the intentional curation of a long-term decision architecture with looser rules, but with the same amount of intentionality and healthy doses of patience. 

That's all for now.  I look forward to talking to you soon.