Delay Every Decision to the Last Responsible Moment
Delay every decision to the last responsible moment.
I love this idea, which I heard attributed to Brian Robertson, the founder of Holocracy.
I first came across Robertson and Holacracy back on the Waking Up the Workplace interview series, which I listened to way back in 2012. Robertson’s idea was that the old methods of organising an organisation, based on predict and control styles of leadership, were outdated, unsuitable for the complexity of the modern workplace and marketplace.
Instead, learning from his work in software companies, we needed a new way of organising a group of people. Less centralised, fewer bottlenecks, fewer silos. That is, in essence, Holacracy: an operating system for a modern company.
But whilst I’ve never worked in a holacratic organisation, Robertson’s ideas about how to be dynamic in a world that is impossible to predict have stayed with me.
He used the analogy of riding a bike for how we have to operate in the face of complexity.
The old paradigm (which many of us struggle to shake ourselves out of, in our organisations and also in our individual lives) approach to riding a bike is swiftly shown to be a fool’s errand. Trying to ride a bike by predicting and controlling might go something like this:
Aim/mission: I want to get to the shop on my bike.
Strategy: I’ll get the bike out, unlock it. I’ll step onto the peddles, push down with my right foot, lean a little to the left, then lean back to the right three degrees, then push down with my right foot, then turn the handlebars slightly right, raise my right arm and look both ways before turning right… [Etc etc for many hours until I reach the shop.]
Imagine then trying to ride a bike by following this strategy. First of all, it’s impossible to balance on a bike by following instructions. Second of all, anything could happen, from a flat tyre to a car coming to a gust of wind that might change everything about this strategy within seconds of the start rendering all that thinking redundant.
Instead, I remember Robertson saying (even 12 years on), we have to focus on dynamic steering.
That’s how you actually ride a bike.
You choose the destination, get on the bike, and let your intuitions guide you as you go. Occasionally you might need to stop and rethink the whole strategy.
‘It’s just too bloody rainy to go to the shop on a bike,’ for example.
I’ve noticed that dynamic steering is part of my coaching work, too.
We have to spend some time thinking about where we’re headed. But we can’t try and predict too much. Well, we can, but it is a fool’s errand.
We have to, to paraphrase somewhat the writing of the psychologist Jordan Peterson, create a best guess of an ideal future, then work towards it, knowing it is only a guess, only an approximation. Discovering as we go more of the truth.
This, the dynamic steering approach, is how we counteract some of the mindtraps (as Jennifer Garvey Berger would say) that human beings fall into in the face of a world more complex than we have ever operated in before.
As we dynamically steer, we can justifiably and sensibly defer all decisions to the last responsible moment.
I love it when a word does a lot of work in a sentence. And the word ‘responsible’ does a lot of work in that sentence. Understanding that might take you much refleciton.
But the truth of that idea stands out clearly to me.
So much energy, worry, though, time can be wasted on planning in an unpredictable world.
And so instead we set our direction.
We steer dynamically towards it.
When we find ourselves wrestling with a decision, we ask: can I responsibly delay making this decision until I know more?
We experiment and learn.
We create new, better guesses of our ideal future when we know more.
And in the end we arrive somewhere surprisingly like initial guess of an ideal future. And yet surprisingly different.
And how we got there, we could never have predicted.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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