Can you image how hard it was to pick a title for this article? Think about all the possibilities for the “teaser line” after the dash. It forced me to . . . (wait for it) . . . decide on one then act on it.
Whew – I wasn’t sure I was going to get through it. Now I’m worried that I might have made a mistake.
Sound familiar? Those of us who have ever raised children, lead a ministry, or for that matter, gotten out of bed in the morning only to be faced with deciding what to do next have gone through it.
Making good decisions is some of the hardest work leaders do. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough to string two or three together, lulling ourselves into a false hope that we are “actually good at this stuff.”
Others (you know who I’m talking about) just seem to make good decisions all the time. Nothing ever seems to go wrong. What’s up with that? How does that work?
This subject contains far too much information to fit into this simple newsletter, but I would like to highlight a few concepts that can help us all turn questionable decisions into good ones – and maybe great ones.
1. Mental Shortcuts:
For the ministry executive, overload is a real problem. Your workload and schedule make it difficult to consistently decide the “best course of action.” Sometimes we make decisions on information “we think we understand” and rarely get right.
To deal with that, people take mental shortcuts that can lead to misreading a situation or drawing conclusions without all the facts. In fact, these shortcuts change our view of reality so that we can hurry up; make the decision and then move on to the next item. We’re creating “blind spots” in our view of reality because we don’t have all the information.
Tip #1: It is sometimes better to delay or deny making a decision if making a bad one will impact you more than waiting to make a good one.
Phrases like: – “I’ll get back to you on that” or “I’ll have to consider how that fits into the overall plan” would be helpful in those situations.
2. Our Biases Can Affect our Decisions:
A bias is an existing inclination that causes prejudiced consideration of a question. This plays itself out in circumstances were personal experience or groupthink is raised to the same level as objective data when making a decision.
Here are few to watch out for:
* Availability Bias – The tendency to consider information that is easily remembered or available – doesn’t dig deeper to find “all the information.”
* Hindsight Bias – looks at the past for primary clues to the present and sounds like “I knew it all along.” It sees events in the past as much simpler or less complex than they really were, giving a false picture of what might happen today.
* The illusion of control – causes you to throw the dice harder when you want a higher number and softer when you want a lower number. In reality, the physics of rolling dice outweighs how hard we throw them – you get the same result no matter what. Applied to our decisions, this leads us to put more emphasis on harder issues, thinking that the more attention or energy will get us a better result. That might happen, but there is no objective reason to believe that it will happen.
Tip #2: Get all the facts together before making a decision – not just the ones that are easily gathered or remembered. Then ask yourself whether you are viewing the decision with a clear perspective, unhindered by biases.
3. Groupthink and the Cancer of Consensus:
The Quakers were truly Godly people who chose to only make decisions when everyone agreed with the plan. That way, they felt that they had “Gods voice” in the matter and could proceed with the plan.
How often does that really work in your ministry? We’ve all seen God’s people sit immobile for years because they couldn’t come to a consensus. I wonder whether that is one of the most powerful tools our enemy uses to keep us, personally and corporately, from being effective for Christ.
Tip #3: It seems to me that if we truly have the Holy Spirit, the person that God appointed as leader should take up the mantle of “vision-caster” and get the troops marching up the hill (as it were). Don’t you?
Finally, let’s make some decisions that are easy:
* That from now on we’re only going to make big decisions when we have all the information required.
* That we’ll be patient listeners to God’s direction. 1 Samuel 3:10 type of listeners.
* That as leaders, we’ll get the advice from “a multitude of counselors” but then we will still be the final decision maker – so that Christ is glorified in the outcome.
Remember, leading and managing a ministry with excellence is what Luke 14: 28-30 is all about. How does that look in your ministry?
