Years and years ago, a friend recommended James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which opens with the “decision” to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I put decision in scare quotes because, in Carroll’s telling at least, there never was any specific point at which Truman was presented with the question “should we drop the atomic bomb or not?”; while FDR was still alive, the US prepared a list of potential targets assuming the bomb worked as hoped, and after his death that list went to Truman for approval. It would have taken specific initiative on Truman’s part to say “no, we’re not going to do this”, and of course he had so many other things on his plate (and so much less context on the Manhattan Project and the bombing plans than FDR had) that it was unlikely he would ever have done that.
In addition to a lesson about complex systems and how bad outcomes can happen without anyone specifically making a decision you can point back to (which I’ll come back to in another post), this taught me something very important about managing up at work in my own life. In my experience, a lot of people’s mental model of how decisions get made at work is “I do some research, I present it to my management, and then they decide what we should do”; in other words, they leave it as an open-ended decision to their management. The problem is that they then often get frustrated at the outcome, because management makes a choice they don’t like, or gets upset at them for not considering other options, or doesn’t ever actually make a decision at all.
The thing is, this is entirely rational from management’s perspective! They don’t have as much context on the issue as the people on the ground do, they have a ton of other things on their plate (just as we all do), and the decision often isn’t as important to them as it is to the people asking for it.
Instead, what I suggest to people is that they prepare a short list of alternatives and present them to management for approval or choice. This changes the conversation from “should we do this thing?” to “which of these things should we do?”, which is much more bounded and easier for a busy and overloaded person to make a decision about.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. It means that people lower on the ladder can (intentionally or unintentionally) manipulate people higher on it, and it means that important context that the people lower on the ladder don’t have may never figure into the decision. And sometimes you end up doing things that in retrospect nobody would have ever wanted to happen. But I’ll talk about how to compensate for those things another time.
