2 Ditches Along the Road of Decision-Making
Too little focus, too little risk
I’ve been posting weekly for a bit, but this will be my last post until sometime in August. Enjoy the rest of your summer! See you in six weeks or so.
Earlier this spring I read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I have appreciated the thought and writing of these two men for the better part of a decade now—Hit Makers by Thompson is especially good—so I was sure to pick up this collaboration of theirs.
The authors do a solid job of critiquing the modern American Democratic movement from the inside while also pulling no punches in their criticism of the American Republican movement. For a solid review of the book from a Christian perspective check out Chris Watkin’s review at The Gospel Coalition from earlier this month.
But while it is certainly a “political” book, as it frames much of its content around some recent political successes and failures on both sides of the aisle, I found much of their discussion insightful far outside the bounds of politics and public policy. I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, but I found it to be a worthy read.
Toward the beginning of the book the authors focused on efficiency in governance and how we have been missing the mark in American on a number of fronts, regardless of political party or persuasion. Two examples were especially striking, and I think they have helpful applications outside government: the lack of focus in the attempt to build high-speed rail in California, and the remarkable fruit that came from calculated risk-taking while rebuilding a bridge in Pennsylvania.
Too Little Focus Hinders Progress
In a chapter reflecting on some failures and opportunities in governance, the authors reflect on the failed attempt to build high-speed rail in California, which is a long and complicated story filled with all kinds of missteps. They write:
When California applied for federal money under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration gave preference to bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific places. The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. California is building high-speed rail in a place thatg makes it less less likely that it will generate ridership, political support, and financial backing to ever finish. The irony is that it’s not just bad for the high-speed rail project. It’s also bad for air pollution across the state.
This foible is a great example of what happens when we try to do too much when we lead a team or run point on a strategic project. Set the politics aside: the state of California undermined its high-speed rail project by trying to accomplish too many things at once.
Why do we do this? Why do we often struggle to maintain focus when we set out on a visionary project of some kind?
Part of why we struggle to focus is because it is easy to think that a big, important, and visionary project needs to accomplish more than one goal. “If we’re undertaking this much effort, we can’t just accomplish one of our objectives,” we think. “We need to accomplish a handful of goals in one fell swoop.”
I think, however, a more likely scenario for why we often lack focus on a big project is rooted in our inability to accept the fact that every decision has a cost, and most decisions in life don’t have a clear “right” or “wrong” answer.
So many big decisions in life are less about answering the question “Which option is the right choice?” and are more about answering the question “Which set of consequences am I more willing to accept?”
A lot of times we attempt to do too much, we lack focus, because we are unwilling to accept the consquences of a decision we make. We “want to have our cake and eat it, too,” as it were—and as a result we frustrate ourselves or botch the project entirely.
When you make critical decisions in leadership—whether in the workplace, in the home, or otherwise—a lack of focus is often a disguise for ill-fated self-protection that is ultimately rooted in a lack of conviction that the decision you’re making is the right one.
Convictional leadership and decision-making can maintain a sharp focus because it recognizes the benefits and consequences of any given decision and is willing to live with both.
When we make criticial decisions we may be tempted to lose focus as a means of self-protection, but there’s another way we mistakenly self-protect that is arguably and ironically more deleterious.
Too Little Risk Is Incredibly Risky
Reviewing a positive example of decision-making and governance, the authors of Abundance review the story of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro leading a bridge rebuilding effort on I-95 in Philadelphia. On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck crashed and exploded damaging the vital East Coast highway. The damaged bridge was reconstructed in just two-weeks—a feat that was praised by politicians and others regardless of political persuasion. Without going into all the details, the governor and other leaders took calculated risks to repair the vital thoroughfare, and those risks paid off.
The authors of Abundance reflect on the decisions made by Shapiro and others, contrasting it with how we often prefer to handle government projects and projects in our own lives and lines of work:
We prefer that projects go badly by the book. We minimize some risks but make delay and high costs routine.
…
The key to the rebuild was that the people in charge of the rebuild could act. “Managers of every component of the project were empowered to be decisive, take ownership and make a call when necessary—not defer and delay to the often-circular bureaucracy,” Shapiro wrote.
That first bit in the quote above is something I often refer to as “active risk” versus “passive risk.” I wrote about this a number of weeks ago in my article “The Temptation of Self-Preservation”:
I think that we often fail to decide because we’re afraid of what will happen if we fail. We are more content failing through inaction than we are by action. Because, at least it seems, if we fail by way of inaction we can blame external factors for our demise instead of actions we took in a valiant attempt that did not lead to success.
If we fail by inaction, we can claim a sort of “victimhood” status, which feels more palatable than if we fail by our own action, which leads to feeling guilty for our own downfall.
Many times, we would rather let circumstances or entanglements of bureaucracy kneecap our plans so that we could claim the project failed by no wrongdoing of our own, but by circumstances out of our control.
I think sometimes, especially in large or old organizations, we can become more interested in process than we are with outcomes. As the authors say in the quote above, “We prefer that projects go badly by the book.” We fill out all the right forms and we attend all of the meetings and we “play house” all the way to mediocrity and failure. But hey: at least we went to all those meetings and followed the processes perfectly!
One of my friends who works in at the executive level in book publishing has shared with me some advice a mentor gave him. The mentor said something like, “Don’t get too far away from the books.” The mentor meant that no matter what other organizational dynamics or bureaucratic requirements come, my friend must remember he works in book publishing.
We must not become so preoccupied perfectly following risk-averse processes and procedures that we neglect to evaluate the outcomes of our work and ask where we may take more risks.
It is often far more risky to avoid taking risks than it is to take them. The long-term atrophying affects of always playing it safe can be our demise before any given risk may be.
As Kierkegaard writes, “Risk—and then God will truly come. But now God sits and watches to see if there is one single person who will venture.”