There was a kind of decision you used to make and move on from quickly.
The everyday decisions – a supplier chosen, a sequence set, a call on which thing waits. You made the decision, explained it if asked, and you moved on.
Over my last years in the role, those decisions stopped closing the way they had. The same call, made the same way, would come back. Someone had read something, or seen what another firm did, or a choice from three weeks ago got reopened in a meeting about something else. The reopen wasn’t a challenge, but the thinking being kept warm, in case the ground moved again.
I had a choice about how to take this shift. I could treat each reopening as a threat. I could defend the decision, hold my line, get tighter. Or I could decide that a decision staying open wasn’t a reflection on the decision, it was just the way the work was going.
So I changed how I made them. I started saying the second look out loud myself, before others did. What would make me revisit this? I stopped presenting decisions as sealed and started presenting them as current: this is the right call on what we know now, and I’ll tell you the day that changes.
It took the heat out of any reopening.
I didn’t decide worse because of the shift. I think I decided more thoroughly – out loud about the options and challenges, playing the scenarios through.
