Assess, Decide, and Act Cycle

Over the last two years, I’ve been active in my local emer­gency response vol­un­teer com­mu­ni­ty. I’ve par­tic­i­pat­ed in sev­er­al mass casu­al­ty train­ing exer­cis­es (e.g., earth­quakes, plane crash­es, col­lapsed build­ing struc­tures).

In sev­er­al of those exer­cis­es, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to train in the role of inci­dent com­man­der (IC) and oth­er lead­er­ship roles.

It was a use­ful, albeit at times hum­bling, expe­ri­ence.

I thought of myself as a log­i­cal, good deci­sion-mak­er. How­ev­er, when faced with real-world stress, it is much hard­er!

At the very start of one of my exer­cis­es, all of our “patients” began scream­ing in agony and pain. It is very hard to think clear­ly when a dozen peo­ple are yelling and groan­ing!

I learned a few things about deci­sion-mak­ing in a cri­sis ver­sus in every­day sit­u­a­tions.

The process I even­tu­al­ly grav­i­tat­ed to can best be described as the: Assess, Decide, and Act Cycle.

1) Assess

Assess refers to gath­er­ing data and devel­op­ing a com­pre­hen­sive aware­ness of the sit­u­a­tion.

The advice I got from pre­vi­ous inci­dent com­man­ders was how vital it is for the IC to main­tain sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness. Every per­son on the team has a spe­cial­ized role. Only the IC is in the infor­ma­tion flow to grasp the entire­ty of the sit­u­a­tion.

The oth­er feed­back I got from those who had been in that role pre­vi­ous­ly is how extreme­ly dif­fi­cult it was to grasp the sit­u­a­tion in the midst of so much chaos and incom­plete infor­ma­tion.

Even ques­tions as sim­ple as “How many peo­ple do you have in the field? What are they doing right now?” were sur­pris­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to answer.

2) Decide

After you know what’s going on, you decide. You decide on either a next course of action or an entire plan.

3) Act

Exe­cute your plan, or at least what you decid­ed is the next step.

Now… repeat the cycle by reassess­ing, adjust­ing your deci­sion based on the new assess­ment, and act­ing based on these revised deci­sions.

In my train­ing exer­cis­es, I found it incred­i­bly annoy­ing that there was­n’t enough infor­ma­tion to devel­op a full-fledged plan.

Q: How many patients do we have?
A: Nobody knows.

Q: Where are they locat­ed?
A: Nobody knows.

Q: What safe­ty risks are there to the team?
A: Nobody knows.

The one con­stant was that there was nev­er enough infor­ma­tion to make a tru­ly well-informed deci­sion.

In many cas­es, the only deci­sion I could make was to sim­ply decide on the next step. This usu­al­ly involved either gath­er­ing more infor­ma­tion or solv­ing the known part of the prob­lem… then reassess­ing the sit­u­a­tion and repeat­ing the cycle.

While this approach to deci­sion-mak­ing is hard­ly new (the mil­i­tary uses a ver­sion of this called the OODA loop — observe, ori­ent, decide, act), it turns out that this approach has applic­a­bil­i­ty in a wide vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions.

If you thought you were doing great at your job, but you got a poor per­for­mance review, you need to reassess what you thought you knew about your career tra­jec­to­ry, decide what to do next, and then act.

If you thought your prod­uct would be well-received by prospec­tive cus­tomers, but they hate your prod­uct, you need to reassess the sit­u­a­tion, decide what to do next, then act quick­ly.

What I’ve come to appre­ci­ate about deci­sion-mak­ing in sit­u­a­tions with extreme­ly high uncer­tain­ty is get­ting accus­tomed to the idea that my deci­sions will like­ly be “wrong” but to do them any­way.

Let me explain.

In school, I learned that there was one right answer. I would do all of my work to get that “right” answer.

At McK­in­sey, all of my train­ing focused on get­ting the cor­rect fact-sup­port­ed con­clu­sion.

In both of these envi­ron­ments, a lot of infor­ma­tion is either known or know­able that allows one to make a well-informed deci­sion.

How­ev­er, in much of life and career, there is uncer­tain­ty. This def­i­nite­ly struck a nerve with me dur­ing these mass casu­al­ty exer­cis­es where there is only one bit of infor­ma­tion (e.g., “air­plane crash),” a dozen scream­ing voic­es, and a man­date to start lead­ing.

In those moments, all of my train­ing to get the “right” answer became a huge lia­bil­i­ty.

I hes­i­tat­ed.

I want­ed to get it right.

I was slow to rec­og­nize and admit my ini­tial deci­sions were wrong.

I was slow to cor­rect my errors because my ego was invest­ed in want­i­ng my orig­i­nal deci­sions to be cor­rect.

And in my after-action review (post-exer­cise “autop­sy”), I real­ized that this was the wrong men­tal­i­ty.

In times of high uncer­tain­ty and lack of infor­ma­tion, the goal should not be to get your deci­sions “right.”

The much bet­ter approach is to assess the sit­u­a­tion, be deci­sive in mak­ing “good enough” deci­sions, take action… and then quick­ly repeat the cycle.

This is a much bet­ter approach than falling for the illu­sion of mak­ing the “right” deci­sion when there isn’t enough infor­ma­tion to fig­ure it out just yet.

It is bet­ter to try to make a “good enough” deci­sion and iter­ate through the whole cycle much more quick­ly.

This is the big dif­fer­ence between work­ing with estab­lished com­pa­nies with $500 mil­lion in sales ver­sus a com­plete­ly new start­up.

The estab­lished com­pa­ny has so much data and infor­ma­tion that is know­able. In those sit­u­a­tions, it actu­al­ly does make sense to ana­lyze the data you have (because you actu­al­ly have quite a lot) to make the “right” deci­sion.

In a brand new start­up, very lit­tle is known (ver­sus what you wish was known). So, iter­at­ing quick­ly (and get­ting used to the dis­com­fort of being wrong often!) is the bet­ter approach.

In both your pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives, where are you in the Assess, Decide, and Act cycle?

Do you notice fear, con­cern, or stress about being “wrong”? Does tak­ing more time to con­sid­er the “right” deci­sion actu­al­ly improve the qual­i­ty of your deci­sion? If so, by all means, take the time to make a good deci­sion. But if more time doesn’t improve deci­sion qual­i­ty, it might make more sense to make a “good enough” deci­sion and then see what hap­pens as a result.