The Leadership Vision Podcast
The Leadership Vision Podcast is about helping people better understand who they are as a leader. Our consulting firm has spent 25 years investing in teams so that people are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Our podcast provides information to help you develop as a leader, build a positive team culture, and grow your organization to match the demands of today’s business landscape. We leverage client experience, research-based leadership models, and reflective conversations to explore personal growth and leadership topics. With over 350,000 downloads from 180+ countries, our podcast shares our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture.
The Leadership Vision Podcast
How Leaders Can Make Better Decisions
In today’s episode of The Leadership Vision Podcast, Nathan Freeburg and Brian Schubring dive into the topic of decision-making. From personal life to leadership, decision-making is an essential skill but most often uncertain. Drawing insights from the book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke, the conversation explores how we can make better decisions by managing uncertainty, separating the process from the outcome, and learning from others’ decisions.
Key Takeaways:
- Embrace Uncertainty and Make Decisions Based on Probabilities:
Leaders often make decisions based on incomplete information, like poker players assessing probabilities rather than outcomes. Embrace uncertainty, make decisions with the information available, and don’t get paralyzed by fear of making the wrong choice. - Separate the Decision-Making Process from the Outcome:
The process of decision-making is what we control; outcomes can be unpredictable. Just like the famous NFL play call by Pete Carroll in the Super Bowl, sometimes great decisions don’t lead to great outcomes. It's essential to focus on the quality of the decision-making process, not just the end result. - Learn from the Decisions of Others:
By observing and reflecting on how others make decisions, especially in high-risk situations, you can build a better understanding of your own decision-making process. It’s not just about mimicking others but evaluating decisions within the context they were made.
This episode is packed with leadership insights and practical advice to help leaders at all levels improve their decision-making processes. Whether leading a team or making personal choices, these strategies can help you navigate uncertainty with greater confidence and clarity.
Resources Mentioned:
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
- Leadership Vision Consulting: leadershipvisionconsulting.com
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Read the full blog post here!
CONTACT US
- email: connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com
- Leadership Vision Online
ABOUT
The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. Contact us to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.
You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years so that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. To learn more about us, you can visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Friberg and today on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about decision-making, perhaps one of the most important tasks we have to do in life. And before we get into all of that, I want you to just reflect on how you approach decisions big ones, small ones as a leader, as a parent, as a partner, as a whatever. Do you rely on your gut instinct, go by a certain set of values or principles or try to weigh all possible outcomes? Now, obviously, it depends on the context and what's at stake, and so in today's episode, we're going to be talking about all of this, as we share three big takeaways from the book Thinking in Bets Making Smarter Decisions when you Don't have All the Facts by Annie Duke. She is a professional poker player and uses that as the basis to challenge us about thinking of our decisions in the terms of bets and uncertainty.
Speaker 1:I'm joined in this conversation today by my friend and colleague, brian Schubring, and together we'll explore how leaders can make better decisions by embracing uncertainty, separating the process from the outcome and learning from the decision of others. This conversation, we think, will help you reflect a little bit on your own decision making process and perhaps give you some new tools to apply in both your personal and professional decision making lives. Let's dive into this. Good morning, brian. How's my hair look? Nathan, your hair looks so good. I'm so excited to do this podcast with you.
Speaker 2:We were talking about how much time I spend looking at my hair in the mirror or what I'm wearing.
Speaker 1:It is too much hair, Too much time on the hair.
Speaker 2:I should say I don't think I've ever been anything but that.
Speaker 1:I agree, I agree. And I directed traffic this morning for school and I wore a taco costume because it's Taco Tuesday and my hair is all I'm realizing now. I should have looked at it before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but your hair is like George Clooney hair. It's like it always looks right.
Speaker 1:It's getting a little grayer. I'm I have to make this big decision. I'm getting my haircut next week and whether or not I want to go really short or kind of keep what I'm doing, cause this is kind of I don't know, it might be time. How do you make decisions, brian? Speaking of decisions, do you have a like a decision?
Speaker 2:tree.
Speaker 1:I'm pivoting hard decisions. Do you have a like a decision tree? I'm pivoting hard? Yeah, like would you say a very big, broad statement that, as a leader, as a husband, as a father, others, as a business owner, as an athlete, as whatever way you want to take this do you have any particular way that you make decisions about things?
Speaker 2:Two things.
Speaker 1:Philosophy rubric two things okay.
Speaker 2:It may sound like three. I think that I am primarily directed by my gut instinct. I am directed by precedent and the prize what's the goal? I think that the older I get, the more I realize that those three factors are somewhat at play. I really have a gut instinct on what I'm looking for, what I'm dreaming, what I'm aspiring to. I'm realizing that I am influenced by history, lived experience, past experience, and I also want to be very clear on the goal and then the direction that we're going. Why do you ask Nathan?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm curious to know about this because today we're going to be talking about making better decisions for leaders, and this came to me because I read this book called Thinking in Bets Making Smarter Decisions when you Don't have All the Facts, by Annie Duke. I don't know if you can focus. Yeah, totally, have you read this? I believe Linda recommended this to me.
Speaker 2:I think Linda read it. I'm pretty sure I didn't. Okay, I don't recognize the cover.
Speaker 1:So it is real quick. So the author, annie Duke, is a professional poker player, oh, and which, when she initially recommended it to me, I was like a poker player. What is this going to be about? But when you think about it, poker is basically just a whole bunch of decisions, one after another, and poker players the really good ones.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's like in the movies where you kind of read people and figure out, but it's essentially evaluating probabilities and making decisions based on that, and so the core thesis of the book is that making decisions and you can apply this to your leadership life, to your personal life, to your financial life, to your you know, weekend softball league, sporting life, whatever it is the core thesis of the book is that decision-making it's more about managing uncertainty and probabilities than it is about predicting outcomes, and so what she really talks about is that and I'm applying the leadership lens to it but leaders can make smarter decisions by really focusing on the process rather than the results, and that doesn't mean that you know they'll necessarily have more success making decisions and control more of what you can control, to kind of let go of the fact that there's all these unpredictable, unforeseen examples.
Speaker 1:And so I have three we'll call them big takeaways, and what I want to do is kind of present the big takeaway, give you just a little bit from the book and then have you riff on it and see if this matches up with your experience as a leader, with any of our leadership visions, work, working with leaders and coaching leaders, and then just kind of kind of kick it around Is this, does this sound good to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does I. I'm getting kind of nervous on your expectation on me being able to riff.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're a riffer, as you say, just totally you know random riffing. You're a good riffer. So here are the three points.
Speaker 1:I want to focus on and there's probably lots more and listeners, if you've read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts. But the three big points are number one embrace uncertainty and make decisions based on probabilities. That's number one. Number two separate the decision-making process from the outcome, and this is one that's really interesting, this one, I think this will be the the, the crux of our conversation, Okay. And the third one is learn from the decisions of others and evaluate in the context of the situation.
Speaker 2:So I want to hear your perspective on that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that one's. That one's really good. So the first one embrace uncertainty and make decisions based on probability. So I'm not a poker player. Coincidentally, I am hosting a poker fundraiser for my kids' school in a few weeks. I know how to play poker. I've played poker.
Speaker 1:I don't understand the probabilities behind it, but what she talks about a lot in the book is how, in poker, players make these decisions based on tons of incomplete information. They're basically betting on the likelihood of a certain outcome, and so I don't know if you know anything about poker, but kind of Texas hold'em, five card. You get two cards in your hand. They lay down five cards I'm blanking. They lay down cards on the table. I have no idea Whoever makes the best hand out of those wins. There's all these different things.
Speaker 1:This really is not about poker, but the point is is you're trying to make all of these predictions based on okay, I have these two cards in my hand, there's these on the table. So you know, it's like I don't know if you've ever seen the old movie Rain man. You're making all these probabilities and so what she says leaders need to do and here's I'll stop talking about the book and we can talk about some examples. Is you look at what you have in front of you? You look at the information, you look at the facts? Is you look at what you have in front of you? You look at the information, you look at the facts, you make the best decision that you can based on the best case scenario, with what you know, and you just kind of embrace this idea of uncertainty.
Speaker 1:Let me just pause there. Does that make sense? I don't want to over-explain or under-explain this, but does that make sense? Because I think a lot of times I want to have a certain outcome before I make a decision. And that's she's just saying you can't, you can never do that which creates a different type of anxiety when making decisions.
Speaker 2:That's that's probably the one thing I want to say off the bat. When you talk about probabilities, about making decisions based on probabilities, uh, I, I. My immediate reaction to that is all the leaders that we are exposed to that are making these calculated decisions based on mostly unknowns. When it comes to probabilities, for the sake of this conversation, I would like to ask well, what are the elements of the probabilities, like name what those are, because I don't know. Nathan in the book does. Does the author, does she talk about the different types of probabilities that a person is making decisions against?
Speaker 1:a little bit. She also talks about, like you know, if it's some sort of life or death decision, you're going to want a much higher probability than if you're like deciding where to go to eat, and so there's some contextualization around like that, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, it does make sense because I'm thinking about when leaders are making business decision. I feel like there are probabilities that they're making decisions against, like the probabilities of individuals, the current environment, any kind of indicators on what the future might be. I think that leaders are putting a lot of risk in how long they think their timeline is, that there's certainty to the behaviors, and they're betting on the probability that the behaviors and attitudes will continue for a period of time. Now, I haven't read the book, I'm just making a hunch on. There are a variety of elements that people are making this bet on and a lot of leaders, including myself, get surprised when we get that wrong, where a person's behaviors, attitudes or beliefs don't play out as long as we thought, or if environmental circumstances change, then you're losing or then you know there's something about that decision that's going to go wrong rather quickly.
Speaker 2:But I think that the point that you're making, Nathan, is to embrace the uncertainty of what is to come, making the best decision you have, and how complex are we looking at the elements of probability.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting to connect to this I heard Jeff Bezos on a podcast talking about like SpaceX or not SpaceX, blue Origin, his space program, one way or two way door decisions. And so he's like there's some things in life and business where it's a one way door you go through, you can never come back. There are these gigantic decisions and you really need to have a very high probability of this is the right decision. But even with that, you don't know. And so another factor that she actually mentioned, and he mentioned this podcast, was like, and to your point of like, what is the timeframe? Is this a you know decision? I'm going to get an immediate result and be able to make some more decisions based on that? Is this like a five, 10, 20 year thing? Or is this a decision we can make and if it's wrong, come back and make another decision?
Speaker 1:And so there's some of that with uncertainty, that different people she talks about this in the book too have different levels of comfortability with uncertainty, different you know again, just timeframes of which, with how much time do they have to you know better decision, just go with what's got a higher probability and done. It's more about this idea of when you make this decision, you do it to the best of your ability at the time, except that you don't know all the answers, except that there's possibly a better decision out there. But based on what I know today, this is what you know. We have to make a decision to move forward and she also talks in there, but people get paralyzed.
Speaker 1:Like oh, for sure any decision and that's sort of that. They're like oh, I just don't know because I could go guess wrong. It's like you have to do something.
Speaker 2:You know what's gonna you know what's going to be the 51% versus 49% outcome. So, and the I mean there's a lot of pressure on the decision maker to you know, play out that likelihood scenario in his or her brain on what might or might not happen. Right, but again, it's going to change tomorrow or later today, exactly so.
Speaker 1:Embrace uncertainty, go with the highest probability.
Speaker 2:And embracing uncertainty is also focused on oneself as well, because the certainty you have today may change tomorrow, based upon the factors that you're considering. Your attitudes may also change, and so there's something about embracing the uncertainty that there's a likelihood that you may not make the same decision six months from now. But, right now, you're betting on the likelihood of something that's going to happen, based on the patterns that got you here. Good luck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good luck.
Speaker 1:And what we don't have time to get into today, but I'll just mention, is, you know, as the leader, your self-worth and your I mean financial and job security, and a lot is riding on some of these decisions, and so you know, it gets emotional and so, again, we can't unpack that, but I guess, just to keep that in mind, the second point, or the second thing that I found most interesting about this book, was separating the decision making process from the outcome, and I don't know how many times I have been in a situation, on both, both ends of this scenario I'm going to mention, where you do something and you're like that was a failure. Why would you decide to do that? And it's like, well, based on what I knew at the time, this is why I did it. It's like, yeah, but why would you possibly think that?
Speaker 1:And the story in the book that really made this stand out was several years ago, when the Seahawks and Patriots were in the Super Bowl. The Seahawks were at the one yard line. They were going to punch it in for a touchdown, put the game away, win the super bowl. Pete carroll, the head coach, he they end up calling for a pass play. It's intercepted. New england runs it back, touchdown, win the game. And everyone's like, why in the world, when you've got I forget his name marshall lynch, maybe the league leading rusher why would you not just pop it in? And to this day, he stands by this decision because, based on these probabilities, this was, from a statistical technical perspective, the right decision. And so one of the points in the book is sometimes great decisions do not lead to a great outcome, sometimes poor decisions lead to a great outcome, and so you really have to focus on the process and not the outcome when it comes to decisions. What resonates about that with you?
Speaker 2:That the decision-making process is like stacking bricks the longer you do it, the higher and more stable it gets. It's like there's just it's a small process. The outcome is something that I really feel we don't really have much control over. I think the outcome is something that I really feel we don't really have much control over. I think the outcome is like setting a direction and not necessarily setting an outcome, is facing a specific direction but not navigating one route to get there. You're just headed, You're going in a specific heading. I think that a lot of people that myself included when you're focused solely on outcomes, then there tends to be this level of expectation and even perfectionism and what you're doing along the way, because you fear so much that you're going to miss a specific outcome. When directional like just heading in the right direction, I think, is, you know, the the best decision. When I first read this outline, when you sent it to me earlier today, this, this one, popped out.
Speaker 2:this question popped out to me quite specifically because, as well, Nathan, you've been around for a while, you know that I'm very outcome for a while you know that I'm very outcome, you know goal-driven and that is a big part of my life, and having you know success or you know the correct outcome is often defined by how I got there and not necessarily about a specific outcome that was dreamed up. It's the process of visualizing the parts of the journey that you can anticipate without knowing exactly where you're going to end up, right, right, well, and I think sometimes you know, brian, like in leadership example, no-transcript or it didn't work. I don't know if it's a failure.
Speaker 1:It didn't work as planned it didn't work as planned and so I would, you know, love to run that whole decision-making process. It's like that was not a good outcome, but I have to imagine that they had some good data. They were looking at probabilities, like this is a smart move for us. Who knows why it didn't work. Maybe, listeners, if you're connected to Target, you can tell us. But sometimes we just look at that outcome and be like those are dumb people, they made a dumb decision, they weren't smart, they weren't doing all this stuff and it's like, you know, maybe cut yourself a break, maybe it was just that process. But this is also where I think values and long-term short like there's a lot of stuff that can go into that decision-making process. And I think maybe the key and this is partially why I asked you at the very beginning is like what's your decision-making process? I think the key for any organization is sort of have some kind of rubric. It's like this is how we make decisions.
Speaker 2:There's so many different contextual examples of that's specifically achieved, usually way down the road, when there's another option of, you know, like I was saying earlier, heading in the right direction and then marking the steps of progress that are being made moment by moment, day by day, activity by activity.
Speaker 2:And the amount of uh, you know emotional and neurological gratification that a person can receive on a daily basis, I think is much better for an individual than delaying a specific you know, then delaying the gratification around a specific outcome. As you know, in the fitness industry a lot of people are asking me like how do they attain certain goals? I try to remind people that that one specific outcome, whether it's weight loss or a certain fitness level or BMI index, or something that's achieved by attending one class at a time, making healthy choices one choice at a time, and understanding that we can make progress towards a specific outcome, but we're also making decisions in this daily routine that we can set up and become much more encouraged along the way, and that, to me, is a greater payoff to the individual, because if they can understand and begin to teach themselves that this you know dosing if you would you know all these positive feelings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a daily thing and I know an individual where they're trying to. You know, um, you know, take a certain amount of fitness classes within a month and that's almost like a daily gratification of being able to see them take these steps towards getting to that goal and that, to me, is yep the outcomes out there of living a healthier lifestyle. But you're making these small decisions and, Nathan, like you and I like, with this whole book idea, you and I have goals or like we're looking for, you know a specific outcome for reading, but we don't know what's going to happen until we actually dive into a book. And even what you said last time we podcast was giving yourself the opportunity to not needing to finish the book. Even that is gratifying because you realize that my outcome is to learn something and if you're not, it's okay to make a decision to stop and try something new.
Speaker 1:Well and that's a great segue to our last one here Learn from the decisions of others and evaluate in the context of the situation. So Shirley stresses the importance of like how do you learn from other leaders, other decision makers, in high risk environments, low risk environments, and evaluate those decisions in context, I think can help all of us evaluate and make better decisions. And again, knowing that there's uncertainty, knowing you got to go on probabilities, knowing you know to focus on that process. But I think that's where even even something like reading this book of like how do I make better decisions? How do you learn from you know characters in a novel, like what I was saying last week?
Speaker 1:How do we learn from you know either sitting down with someone and say how did you decide to sell this house and buy that house? How did you decide to sell business, this business, and buy that business? How did you decide to write a book? How did I mean fill in the blank? How can you expand your repertoire, so to speak, so that when it comes time to make a similar decision, you have something to pull from? Do you, can you think of it? Well, first, what do you think of that? But then, second, do you have any examples of leaders that are good at kind of leaning on the decisions of others, leaders that they've learned from?
Speaker 2:Man. I know both. I know a lot of leaders that rely on learning from the decision of, from the decisions of others, and I also know a lot of leaders that consider themselves, you know, so entrepreneurial or pioneering that they're not going to listen to anybody else. They want to do it their own way. So I kind of have this experience where I know people that are on both ends of the spectrum and anywhere in the middle. I'm not drawn to the learning lessons or learning from the decisions of others as much as I am.
Speaker 2:Evaluate the context, because that to me, I think, is that's almost the more important question to me. Of course, I would invite anyone to learn lessons from other people that have gone before they've learned something and to let those decisions inform the decision that you're making. But I think it's even more important to evaluate the context. If you evaluate the contextual conditions of a decision in the past, of course that's not going to be mirrored in the present, but to also do the practice of evaluating the contextual circumstance that you're currently in and also knowing. You know, from our first point, you're still making a decision based on a likelihood or probability of something happening, but contextual forces will always influence your decision.
Speaker 2:If you can imagine, if you would, a team of individuals sailing like sailing a boat, sailing like sailing a boat. They are always responding to the contextual, the context of their situation, the context of the water, the context of the sailing vessel and the context of the atmosphere, and those contexts are always changing. So that, to me, is so important. We always say that context matters and context has a shaping influence. Those are things that we really really lean on, so I just love this point. Number three learn from the decisions of others and evaluate in the context of their situation and in the context of your situation.
Speaker 1:It's interesting you say that because I was. We had some friends over for dinner and they had made a decision about something in their life that I was like telling my wife. I was like that seems ridiculous. Why would they do this, Do they?
Speaker 2:have four kids.
Speaker 1:What's that? Do they have four kids? Not four, but. And so they were over and just sort of kind of off the cuff. I was like, hey, why did uh? I'm just curious, why'd you guys decide to do that? And when he when the husband kind of unpacked his process, shared a little more context, I was like, oh, that actually I can totally see that wouldn't have made sense for our family of six, but that makes sense and I think that was actually a good decision and maybe we'll.
Speaker 1:I don't know if we'll close on this, if you have any thoughts, but sometimes you know, when you learn from others, it's like get that context, understand what's going on, understand more of your own context when making these decisions. And then I think sometimes, brian, we need to set like a deadline. I'm going to decide by this date, because you could always get more information right, you can always collect more details. Eventually, you do have to make a decision and decide with this. So do you have any final thoughts or last little nuggets of wisdom that might help our listeners as they're approaching a decision? I mean, we've talked about embracing uncertainty. We've talked about separating the outcome from the decision-making process and then learning from others. How can we learn from you in this? With one, I don't know truth bomb.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I would just say is be kind in making your decisions, knowing that the likelihood of your decision going wrong is pretty high. You will always have a chance to make another decision. And practice that with yourself and with others.
Speaker 1:I love it, brian. Thank you so much. Thank you, nathan, and thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. If you found value from this episode or any of our other materials, we would love it If you could share this with someone that you think could benefit from this as well. We'd also appreciate it If you could follow us and all the social channels. Subscribe to our email newsletter. Subscribe to our email newsletter at leadership.
Speaker 2:I got so many leaders Consultingcom.
Speaker 1:I might leave that in there, cause that was a funny little plug up and follow us on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nathan Friberg and I'm Brian Schubring, and on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:Stop.