A good friend of mine (who also happens to be a solid people manager) once told me that there were very few dumb decisions made in an office.  At first, this struck me as completely false.  Don’t people make dumb decisions all the time?  Managers hide information from subordinates.  Marketing doesn’t talk to engineering or design, so the launch buzz gets skewed.  A teammate gets promoted into a position that she can’t handle, but no one does anything about it.  We’ve all encountered these mistakes in the workplace.

My friend went on to explain: A lot of times, decisions are made for certain reasons.  The manager, for example, may not have time to gather all information, so she makes the best decision she can on the fly.  Sometimes, there might be hidden factors at play, such as only having enough budget to devote to one project.  Still others involve trading resources between teams or groups.

I still wasn’t convinced.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t any dumb decisions.

Finally, my friend asked, “Have you ever made a decision that others didn’t like?”

Well, yeah of course, but for good reason.

“But did your teammates feel it was a good reason?”

I’m usually pretty good at explaining myself, I thought.  When people get frustrated with me, I show them why I did something by going through my decision-making process.

“And that left your teammate satisfied?”

And that’s where he finally got me.  Of course, even after explaining, it doesn’t mean people have always been happy with my decisions.  Case in point: I used to be in charge of marketing the Torque Game Engine series.  After I moved on to pursue other goals, I had a drink with one of my fellow (albeit junior) marketers.  We talked about my decision to open a store to sell Torque schwag like hats, shirts, and mouse pads to devoted fans of our product.  Several customers had mentioned they wanted Torque goodies, so it seemed like a no brainer.  Of course, that meant the web development team had to push other priorities, some of which were high on my colleague’s plate, but after objectively looking at our schedule, I made the call to push the schwag store to the top of our priority stack.

So here I was, a year later, having a drink with my co-worker, and he finally admitted to me,  “The merchandise store was a dumb move.”

It didn’t matter that I explained to him my reasoning.  It didn’t matter that all the indicators pointed to it being a good move.  He was just upset, a year later, that some of the things he wanted the web team to work on got pushed off.  To his credit, I thought the tasks he wanted implemented by the web team were trivial at best, affecting only a handful of suppliers.  The bottom line is we would have made different decisions in this situation.

Whether we like it or not, people make decisions given their limited information and biases.  When it comes down to my prioritization and your prioritization of tasks – who’s to say who is right?  And if our values don’t match, who’s the dumb one?  Maybe in retrospect, we can point out “dumb” decisions, but at the time, we can only work with what we’ve got.

-Deborah Fike

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