YOU DECIDE

We all know that concession to democratic management of our households when we grandly proclaim “you decide”. It could be about anything….where to go for lunch, what to do at the weekend or what garment to buy.

This conversation we’ve started is about more than it seems. It’s as much about a slippery avoidance of making the decision ourselves as an act of generous delegation.

Because actually making decisions is hard.

And it’s getting harder because so many interests now need to be included.   It’s no longer a case of making the logically correct choice. The difficulty of being a leader is in creating the illusion of decisiveness without irritating those around you who’ll immediately tweet their irritation if they are irritated and then sullenly go slow.

What do you decide to do about the following if the buck stopped with you?

• Syria
  
• Fracking
  
• HS2
  

And “I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer.

Sometimes decision making is so hard because what we really believe ourselves is not what most of the group who are described as stakeholders quite believe…life is full of shade of grey.  So the skill that is being adopted now in making decisions is not decision making but enrolling votes of support or, worse, avoiding a row.

And if the proposition changes from a simple binary choice to a complex “maybe” so be it, so long as everyone is happy or rather not unhappy or more probably that the majority view is not one of strong dissent.

I recently heard the Prime Minister was asking advisors to “examine all options” on Syria. Isn’t that what we do in considering decisions? But I smell the whiff of “let’s parade the sheer complexity of the issues to obfuscate our difficulty in making an acceptable decision”.

In this world the clamour for strong leadership is based on the myth that Thatcherism is the answer…a little like suggesting bleach is such a great germ killer and cleaner we should all wash our hands in it.

It isn’t always that simple…as she discovered when deciding on the poll tax

In the end decision making is very hard.

We need to think – that hardest of activities – using the most sensitive of weighing machines - the human mind. Just watch a judge at work, analysing, pondering, reflecting and deciding.
So next time you say “you decide” remember it’s like saying “you do the calculus”.