Making decisions unburdened by ‘risk management’ myths

Roger and I presented at RAW2020, co-facilitating a workshop on the Universal Decision-Making Method. The workshop drew on our shared investigation, across decades, of decisions that produced poor outcomes or went significantly wrong.

What we found, consistently, was not that the wrong option had been chosen. It was that assumptions had gone unnamed, unranked, and unmonitored. The decision-maker had relied on things being true without writing down what those things were. When one of them turned out to be false, the decision failed, and nobody could explain why, because nobody had recorded what the decision was resting on.

The Universal Decision-Making Method is not a new invention. It is a description of what all decision-makers do, whether they are aware of it or not. A pilot deciding whether to divert. A board deciding whether to acquire. A family deciding whether to move. The steps are the same: state the purpose, name the opportunity, surface the assumptions, decide what level of certainty is sufficient, build monitoring into the decision before it leaves your desk.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful decision-makers is not intelligence, experience, or access to information. It is awareness and skill in applying the method. The unsuccessful decision-maker applies it unconsciously and incompletely. The successful one applies it deliberately.

Attempting to take account of and resolve uncertainty via the concept of “risk” and the constructs of “risk management” is neither an effective nor a logical path. Risk management distracts from the method. It substitutes registers for reasoning and matrices for judgement. It creates a parallel process that runs beside the decision instead of inside it.

The alternative is straightforward. Help decision-makers apply the method they are already using, but apply it with awareness and skill. That is what the book does. That is what the Walk does.