Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hi everyone. It's Ricardo Vargas here. Welcome to the 5 Minutes podcast. This week I want to talk about how to make and live with imperfect decisions and projects, and why I want to talk about this, because hard decisions in projects, they have no right answers. You know, I am an engineer, and I love math. And I would love that every single decision would be made possible with a clean cut, you know, like two plus two is equal to four. And then I make that decision. It's like a set of multiple choices where one is the right. But honestly, most of the project questions, and the most relevant ones, are open-ended questions. There is no clear, perfect, and right answer. And how do we live with that? And I want to share with you three tips that I use in my own life when facing this. Most of the work I do is based on imperfect decisions. Every time you are working with complex projects, complex project settings, troubled projects, or crisis management, you need to make most of the decisions. There is such a huge amount of uncertainty that it is impossible for you to make a perfect decision. So, how do I do? The first thing I do is embrace uncertainty. I know that uncertainty is part of the game. It's part of the project that there is no way I will find a perfect, sharp, exact answer. So, I embrace and understand that this is part of what it is to live today. It's part of what is to do Project Management today. You have uncertainty in terms of technology; you have geopolitical uncertainty. There are a lot of things going on, and you just need to understand that your project is full of this type of influence, and there is no way you can find a perfect answer to that. For example, we saw the tragedy of the fires in California. It's it's such a tragedy. And I see a lot of people now blaming or blaming this, blaming the water, blaming the weather, and it's right to blame and try to learn. But honestly, it's truly impossible for you to have perfect certainty about events that have not happened yet. It's easy for us to criticize or to to learn or to discuss things we did wrong during Covid 19. But what would we do with Covid 45? And I'm just joking here. Covid 45 and why Covid 45? Because we don't know what will happen in 2045. Will we have another pandemic? So we need to understand that this volatility and this complex environment are part of what is working, what is to work today, what is to do Project Management today, we do not know all the answers. And the second thing on the top of Embrace Uncertainty is to fight paralysis with clear deadlines. One of the biggest challenges, and I saw that many, many times, is the psychological paralysis of the project manager and the critical stakeholders in the projects when making complex decisions. Why? Because when you have too many possible outcomes, when you have a too complex environment, most of the time, we feel more comfortable in not deciding and not saying in postponing decisions and saying, no, let's not decide, let's not decide. So, you need to fight this because when you have this type of paralysis, you do not move forward. And how do you do that? You put deadlines. Deadlines for decision. It means I need to make this decision, even if it's not the perfect one. I need to decide by the end of next week. I need to decide in two weeks. I need to decide in one day. I need to decide in one week. So, by setting deadlines, you create pressure for you to make decisions. If you leave an open-ended end, what will happen? You will procrastinate, procrastinate, and you will not be able to make any decision whatsoever. And the third thing, when possible, when possible, bring reversibility in your decisions. Every time I need to decide one of the best options, or I would say, uh, the less bad option is the one that I can bring reversibility. Because if I take a path of decision that is not the best one, and I notice later that it's not the best one. What can I do? I can just reverse them. I'm not saying that all of them will be possible or every single decision will be reversed, but if this happens, we will not need to record a podcast like this one. But every time, for example, I always try in complex scenarios, bring reversibility to my decisions. And let me give you one example that that is for me a nice example. And it's a personal example. One of the first projects I did in my life was a blast furnace in a steel company, and this was a very large maintenance project. And I always like to tell this, this history, because when you are, I would say, um, preparing, uh, the, this furnace to be maintained to remove, for example, the refractories in the walls, you need to remove the the iron, the melted iron from this furnace. And many times these may not go well and you need to do a controlled explosion inside this, this furnace to remove these, these walls to remove these refractories. So what we did, we made a reversible decision. We hired a company that is specialized in explosions. And we did an agreement and we we brought reversibility to this agreement. We said, look, if we need to explode the furnace and make this a controlled explosion, we will pay you X amount. But if we do not need. We will pay only a fraction of that for you to mobilize your team if we need to do that. And this brought the reversibility because let's suppose I do not need to make the explosion. So why I would hire an explosion company to do a job that I don't need. So we brought this contingency inside the agreement. So many times you can include in your legal agreements in your in your procurement process a reversibility aspect. And this will give you some leeway to change your mind and to make and live with these imperfect decisions. And one additional one I was thinking initially on three, but I want to give you a bonus one, it's you should practice a clean regret. Many times when you make an imperfect decision and things do not go well, you blame yourself. You do self blame. You say, oh, I shouldn't have not done that. And this, this does not help. These just lower your moral. Lower your ability to lead the team as a project manager. You need to focus on what you can learn. Of course, it's much better that you make the right decisions. But honestly, if you are up to work in project management, you need just to understand that everything you want to do is to make more right decisions than wrong ones. So, in almost 30 years of working in project management, I made many, many, countless wrong decisions. But every single one, at least, I tried to learn. It's a very expensive way to learn, but focus on learning and not self-blame, because if you practice self-blame, you will weakness, you will make your ability to decide in the future even harder because you know you will fear punishment, you will fear this feeling, and then you will be more and more victim of this paralysis. So at the end, every time you need to decide, let's suppose you need to decide this week. You need to understand uncertainty is part of the game. Fight this paralysis with deadlines, and when possible, try to bring reversibility to your decisions. If you can do this tree and stop blaming yourself when you make wrong decisions, you are set to become a great project manager in the current times. Think about that, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
