Important decisions

Two things can happen when you make an important decision: You succeed, or you fail.

What's interesting is that success or failure is not always related to the quality of our decision. We could have made the best decision and still failed, and the other way around is also true.

As we cannot guarantee that a high-quality decision will unequivocally cause the expected outcome, we must embrace our failures.

There is a difference between high-quality decisions and right decisions. The quality of a decision is about the process of making it; the right decision is about the outcome of it.

Sometimes there are no right decisions, but they still need to be made.

A low-quality decision might come from different sources: Our own biases, blind spots, inaccurate data, erroneous hypothesis, lack of humility, or excess of confidence, among others. Those are low-quality because the decision-making process failed to identify and reduce the sources of mistakes.

However, the outcome of an important decision might vary due to thousands of variables out of our control or just because there is no possible right outcome.

So, what can we do?

As hard as it may be, you need to acknowledge it and prepare yourself to fail well. Here's how you can do it.

1. Identify how you will measure the outcome of your decision. People may use different metrics.

2. Own the decision and be accountable for its outcome, whatever it is.

3. Can you revert the decision and stop the bleeding? If so, is it the right decision to make? Sometimes the pain is unavoidable.

4. How will you learn from it?

Learning to make the right decision is important, but knowing what to do after we mess it up is vital.