Contexts and Decisions

The past few weeks have been spent on decision making and when you stop and think about it, decision making is something that can easily be taken for granted. I would argue that for most people decisions are constantly occurring. From the manager deciding on bonus or strategic planning, to the homemaker deciding on dinner, or the professor deciding just how close the rubric a student's assignment really is. For some of these the decisions may not be overly complex or at least on the surface. Even a homemaker will need to weigh several variables from budget to individual tastes when deciding dinner. Yet those cause and effects are linear. Add in the potential mood of whomever is returning home and things become slightly more complex and a homemaker may have to do some guesswork or asking of questions to get to a result.


Recently I had a good decision to make. In April of 2016 I was offered jobs concurrently on two different sides of the country. One in California and one in New York. There were some known variables such as the position descriptions, climate of the area,  and pay scales but there were quite a few unknowns as well. I had to research housing costs in each area as both areas are expensive enough to be of concern. I also had to use some intuition to determine which supervisor I would best get along with. I know that I am fairly irreverent at times and that doesn't sit well with everyone. To go along with this, I also had to pack, move, budget, apply for school again, arrange storage, and so on and so forth. In some ways that was a bit of chaos.  Anyone who has ever moved for a job can understand just how much of a pain it is. However, the actual choosing of the jobs was decided in two contexts. The simple was New York was slightly cheaper on housing and my pay would go just a tad further. However, the more complex context was determined by chatting with the two supervisors on opposite ends of the country. I informed them both of my conundrum and chatted with them about the "average day" of the office. In the end I made my choice. What's funny about making decisions in the void is that I find myself constantly wondering if I made the correct choice. I will never really know what the other office was like and that bothers me to a certain extent.


Most of my day to day decision making in the professional sense tends to stay in the complex or complicated quadrants of the Cynefin Framework. I struggle to actually think of specifics as lately I've had more than one at a time to worry about. In that sense I do have to decide what cases will get my priority. In the simple context I can look at the severity of their cases and decide from there, however it sometimes turns out that the less severe case will need the most attention. Levels of severity in terms of addiction can mean how ready the person is to make a change. So while it may be easy to divert resources to a severe case that may mean wasting those resources that could have been used for someone that is further along in treatment. This gets into a great many unknowns but I wouldn't qualify it as being in the chaos quadrant but rather in the complicated quadrant. We have to use some intuition and "sense" to make a choice on where we focus efforts; though sometimes we reverse courses midstream.


Therein lies part of the problem as well as serve the underlying point of complexity theory in leadership. It both works and it doesn't. Just as the quantum particles that complexity theory is derived from are both there and they aren't. Many decisions do occur in a fog or are based on intuition and a certain level of subjective-ness. The interconnecting relationships that form between people add to these layers of psychological push and pull. A leader may not have time to sit down and analyze what quadrant something is in before making a choice. Many choices are time-sensitive. The Cynefin Framework is best described a tool to change thinking. It forces the learner to understand that forces both seen and un-seen are at play with decisions and that simple cause and effect relationships are actually quite rare. When you dig into most decisions, like our homemaker up there, you can add many layers of  complexity. The trap is that a leader can drive his or herself crazy by trying to answer layer upon layer. At some point a choice has to be made, what is hoped is that the Framework has trained the decision maker to think around SOME of those corners and take into account that other relationships (un-intended) may be affected.