Be confident on what you do not know

You have been waiting for it… and here it is: An inspirational quote to start this article:

“The wise man knows he knows nothing”.

This sentence can be attributed to Socrates and I will link it to modern day decision making in the consulting context. The main insight of this section is that you should not expect yourself to know everything, even though customer expectations often feel like you should. Understanding your own limits is crucial for improving decision making and this is both your and your customers goal.

In order to make good decisions, you need relevant information. The art is to identify which information is crucial for a decision, even if you are not an expert in a topic. To put it a little different: When making decisions, it is not necessary to know everything about the context (which is impossible anyways), it is necessary to identify the crucial information. Even if you are hired as an expert in a certain field, you will not be able to know everything since there are always specifics to every company that you just can not anticipate. Especially in the beginning of a project it is important for you to be open about limited or missing information and explore their impact. If you are asking yourself what I am talking about, let me elaborate: There are basically two categories in the context of missing information when talking about decision making:

1. “I dont know and it is not important”

2. “I dont know but its crucially important”

Talk to experts in order to identify if details you are missing fall in the second and crucial category. Don’t be afraid to seek advice from the customer side. Internal experts will be happy to share their knowledge with you… most of the time. Talking about time: Don’t let too much time go by before investigating on the facts crucial to a decision. Six months after starting a project it might not give the best impression if you are starting to gather basic information. Of course there will be cases in which information is simply not available. In that case, clearly communicate to the decision makers on what you do not know. Even though it might feel like you are showing some weakness in doing so, everybody will appreciate your transparency and it will even be seen as a strength in the long run.

Let’s look at a practical example to get a clearer picture about what I am talking about: Imagine you are hired by a large corporation to bring one specific old software up to the latest technological standards. The project sponsor wants you to prepare a decision memo regarding the steps to be taken within 3 weeks. After two weeks, you have identified that one major task would be to upgrade the software’s data format to the current industry standard. So far so good, but for a good decision to be made you are missing an information: Will the updated data format be compatible with other software in the company's software system? You think about the implication of the missing details and come to the realization that you don’t know it, but it is crucially important for the decision making since it has an effect on the whole software infrastructure. When talking to internal experts, nobody seems to be able to give you a clear answer. Steve, the internal system architect, tells you: “I guess the new data format could be compatible…”. The due date for the decision memo has come and you actually only have one real option if you want to enable the project sponsor to make a good decision on what to do next: Be confident on what you don’t know. Tell the decision makers that the software’s data format needs to be updated in order for it to be up to new technological standards. What is missing for you to give them a valid recommendation for action is the information about internal software data compatibility. You now have the chance to let them know what you need in order to find that out. “If we run a quick series of tests we should have an answer within the next four working days. This will cost us about 20.000 EUR, but will make sure the undertaking is thought through” is how you could suggest to proceed.

Do not simply make an assumption at such a point - In quite a lot of cases people work with assumptions in order to save some time or to appear like they know it all. That might actually save you some time and might even make you look more competent in the short run but it definitely downgrades the quality of the decision that has been taken. If you are missing crucial information for a decision think of this book and be clear about it. Decision making will drastically improve as a nice side effect.

To sum this section up: Do not expect yourself to know everything, but be very clear about the information you need in order to enable a good decision. Focus on gathering the crucial information and be transparent about what you do not know. Decision making will improve if you are very clear about the required information.