Changing a Good Decision Making Process Based on Results

Construction projects are complex requiring thousands of decisions made across dozens of teams over many months to ultimately result in a good outcome

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
D. Brown Management
March 4, 2018 2 minute read
Share
Leadership Tools: Resulting. Don't Confuse Good Results with Good Decision Making Processes. Book: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

As a leader in the construction industry the majority of your value-add is:

  1. Making good decisions
  2. Ensuring those decisions are executed
  3. Teaching others how to do the same  

In a simple system the decision tree may have a few known variables and a single clear path which is easily trainable.  

Most project decisions are more complex having more variables and outside influences impacting results over a longer time span.  Given time pressures and limits of the human brain only a few of those variables can be accounted for accurately in our mental model of a situation.  

The results of a good decision making process are not 100% good but the average results over time are good.  Resulting is a term used in poker when a player starts changing a good decision making process based on the resulting outcomes.  This seems logical but will lead to an overall decline in results with increased variability.   

Smarter, Faster, Better

Contact us to learn how we train teams to make better decisions

Incentive Compensation for Contractors - Introduction
Every successful and profitably growing contractor we work with has a comprehensive and integrated set of incentive programs in place at all levels of the organization. These programs reinforce the daily actions and behaviors that make them successful.
Related Article
Two Restaurants on Saturday Night
Leaders of construction companies have to make many decisions with less than perfect information. Many times we are looking for perfectly formatted data in some sort of a report but there are indicators all over the place.
Related Article
Change Management Foundation
There are four foundational items that support great change management. Without these in place, you will never get the value out of streamlining the process.
Related Article