Making Decisions in Uncertain Times (Part 2)

These are strange times we live in, made stranger by the kind of decisions we are having to make at the workplace. Many managers who always demanded that teams reported to office for work are having to make peace with work from home becoming the new norm. Others have had harder decisions to make about headcount, budgets for essential resources all with a focus on just surviving 2020. And the year has done a damn good job so far of showing us how uncertainty can drain our time and energy forcing us to calculate every step we take!

But not all situations look the same. Many have come without any warning of the change it brings with it, many others have been so sudden and swift, it left no room for choice at all for those in its path. And in both cases, those who chose not to decide and those who got no choice, the situation made the decisions for them and all they could do was live through its consequences. Let me pick two stories from this pool to highlight an important insight:

A tale of two decisions

Our first story takes us to Rochester, New York where the headquarters of the most formidable technology company of its time stood: The Eastman Kodak Company. You may have already heard or read before of how Kodak’s employees were the ones who invented the digital camera way back in 1975 and yet could not capitalize on it. This story is from a few years later in 1979, about a report that came after it by one of its executives, Lawrence Matteson. Based on all the evidence they gathered, the report predicted that the mass market would transition from film to digital technology by the year 2010. 

Imagine if you were part of the Kodak board and you hear that one of your greenhorn projects the digital camera is all set to take over a business established over decades. What would your immediate reaction be? Chances are you would highly suspect the validity of such a claim. ‘People are so used to printing and storing photographs, how will they do that with the digital camera which has no reel in it?’ ‘The quality of the pictures that are displayed on the television screen are so grainy while the print quality is miles ahead of it, why would anyone choose the digital camera?’ On the surface, it made no logical sense to invest any time and money in the digital camera.

The other story is from a few years later, 26 September 1983. On that night, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was going about his work at the Serpukhov-15 bunker in Moscow which housed the command center of the Soviet early warning satellites. It was Lt. Col. Petrov’s duty to monitor the network and to inform his superiors of any impending nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Just after midnight, the computers reported that one intercontinental ballistic missile was heading towards the Soviet Union from the United States! And before anyone could make sense of this, in a few minutes, four more missiles showed up on the system! 

While this seems ludicrous now, this was in the 1980s. It was the peak of the Cold War between the US and USSR, a time when the US President Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. And just a few days earlier, the USSR has shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane headed from the US to Seoul that accidentally flew into Russian airspace and killed a US Congressman and several American passengers. Picture yourself in that bunker in Lt. Col. Petrov’s position: would you follow protocol and rush to inform your superiors about these missiles or would you wait and consider the possibility that it is a malfunction? And all of this within a few minutes because those missiles will be here in half an hour!

Intuition and Deliberation

Here were two stories, both completely different in their contexts and yet bonded by the process of decision making. We, of course, know the epilogue to them: Kodak did not heed to the prophetic warnings of Matteson and his team and the fact that we are not living through nuclear winter right now gives you a hint of what happened that day in the bunker in Moscow. Is this a case where deliberation failed a world class camera company and the intuition of an unknown air force officer saved all of humanity? 

While Kodak’s executives seem very deliberate in their decision on the surface, they were in fact completely throttled by their fears of the unknown. From where they were standing, a photograph chemicals and products specialist company going for a completely alien technology like digital photography was like jumping into the abyss, especially when they were perfectly safe where they were. This was a change no one asked for and no one wanted. So the leaders reasoned that the transition to digital would be a painful process for them with no benefit in the end, the managers reasoned that none of them had the expertise in digital technology and therefore it would be impossible for Kodak to make any progress in it quickly. And the hundreds of researchers, engineers and technicians reasoned that this digital camera thing was just another fad, one among the many they may have seen over the years at Kodak. Collectively, they promoted Groupthink in Kodak, where agreeing with each other for survival became more important than the greater good of the organization that nurtured it. So much more important that they did not even consider it as a possibility and outright rejected the venture with their reasoning, making a decision that ultimately proved fatal for the company’s existence.

But if this led you to think that Lt. Col. Petrov’s decision was all intuition, you would be misreading the events of the 1983 nuclear false alarm incident. If it was indeed just pure instincts, we would have quite literally experienced Extinction by Instinct: a decision taken without any planning or thorough systematic process. But Lt. Col Petrov’s decision was not just instincts, it was well deliberated speedy decision. What helped him in this was his education as a radio engineer, his years of training in the Soviet Air Forces in the process of warfare and strategy and his expertise in the early warning detection system. He also had first hand experience with the early detection satellite system especially the fact that is was not entirely reliable and he himself knew that the system was raw.

He brought this experience and knowledge to good use, and concluded within the first few seconds that the alarm must be ‘false alarm’, because a first-strike nuclear attack from the US would be one with hundreds of simultaneous missile launches to disable any means of Soviet counterattack. When Lt. Col. Petrov was later asked to describe the decision, he said it was a half guess. What he underplays in it so humbly is that the other half of that decision was well informed, researched and synthesized in those split seconds, taken by a mind trained and experienced in taking an objective decision on this!

Given a choice between immense knowledge and unbounded conviction, each one of us including the Kodak executives and Lt. Col. Petrov would choose knowledge over conviction to take complex decisions. And that is a great choice. Knowledge gained through deliberation helps one see that issues do not exist in binary form but in all the shades in between. It helps one maintain a level of self-doubt which is critical not to get too cocky in their ways. But it is just as necessary to flex the intuitive muscle groups so that one can synthesize information at lightening speed and decisions can be taken in a time sensitive manner. Many skills contribute to build this intuitive muscle: open mindset, adaptability, progressive thinking, collaborative spirit, agile thinking and empathy. And while we cannot build all these skills in a day, the best crucible to build them in is uncertain times.

Making Decisions through Uncertainty

Decision making while essential to the way we live and work can be a complex undertaking. And when you add uncertainty into the mix, it just makes it that much more difficult to negotiate. Uncertainty strains the system by forcing us to deliberate and decide on things we would not have had to worry about in other circumstances. Take the current crisis, which is making people anxious about how to get their supplies, how to reach their homes safely, how to hold onto their jobs and continue to have a decent standard of living all while they fight a virus that could threaten their health. Dealing with these challenges that we do not have to face in other times causes severe anxiety and stress. How well can we deal with crises in that case? On the contrary, the negativity bias causes us to prepare for the worst even when that is not the case: stockpiling and hoarding onto supplies, taking unnecessary risks in travel, losing the ability to be effective at work and being hurtful to friends and family.

Uncertainty also creates urgency because of there are so many unknown variables that figure them out too late in the day which leaves us with little time find a well thought through solution. Between sudden lockdowns, and constantly changing regulations and protocols, escalating emergencies at work and client side crises, we have reached a point where everything needs to be solved as of yesterday and is a do-or-die situation.

But most of all, the fog of uncertainty causes the freeze response of our brain to activate. When we are not quite sure what would solve the problem, we begin to think of the problem as a bad phase that will pass over us without affecting us: all we have to do is sit tight! And our inaction could lead us to a greater catastrophe than one if we did take some action.

What can you do with your team?

Uncertainty is tough beast to tackle when making critical decisions. But as managers you can get yourself and your team to handle it with great skill by making it part of your skill set. Here are some things you can start doing to make high quality and speedy decision, even in uncertain times:

• Find the balance between intuition and deliberation in your decision making process, what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2 thinking. And while many most of you spend a lot of time analyzing and deliberating information, it is also crucial to build your intuitive muscles and that of your team by co-opting them in the decision making process.
• Combat uncertainty by bringing in routine in whatever parts you control, engage with your team and earn their trust in the decision making process, stay curious for as long as the situation allows and go meta by thinking about how you thought things through after each decision you take.
• You also need to give yourself some space and time to decompress and take a pause when you can to allow your mental faculties to make sense of the tons of data you are hit with in uncertain times. Be it through meditation or a passion project or a quiet time engaging in an activity you like. Use your time and the time of your team judiciously by building for a just-in-case scenario in addition to the usual just-in-time schedule.

And while tough times do not last, tough people usually do through the decisions they took with the best of their knowledge, skills and experience and without letting fear and bias get the better of them.

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