Susan Warren's [ v ] Blog

Soft Skill #3: Decision making

I haven't shared my definition of a soft skill yet, so I'll do that before I talk about decision making (which is the poster child of soft skills IMO).

A soft skill is a skill that lets you be effective in your job, but isn't directly related to your profession.  So teamwork is a 'soft' skill, whereas programming in .NET is a 'hard' skill.

So let's talk about decision making -- the ability to make timely, high-quality decisions.  It's one of the most essential soft skills once you advance past an entry-level job.  In a consulting company like Vertigo, it's indispensible: our clients come to Vertigo because they need the right thing built, not just anything.  They are paying for our exceptional professional judgement, the Vertigo 'secret sauce' of technical knowledge, experience, and (of course) decision making.

Decision making is a two step process.  First, you need to gather and understand the facts and the context for the decision.  Next, you apply analytic ability and common sense to the data to reach a decision.  Sounds simple enough, but there are some common pitfalls.

Analysis Paralysis.  This catchy term means getting stuck in the decision making process without ever reaching a decision.  Good decision making has to be timely in order to be effective, so analysis paralysis can be fatal.  Analysis Paralysis seems to mostly afflict folks without much decision-making experience. 

The cure for analysis paralysis is practice, practice, practice.  I specifically prescribe making 80/20 decisions.  Try for an 80% perfect decision, with just 20% of the effort require to get to the 100% perfect decision.  This is where that proto-skill confidence comes in handy.  You will make a few bad calls with this approach -- be sure to fess up to 'em and most importantly, learn from them.  But you'll also gain a lot more decision-making experience this way, and the quality of your decisions will improve dramatically.

Unteachable Factors.  Every skill, hard or soft, can only be acquired if you have some abilities as an individual.  For decision making these include native intelligence, common sense, and motivation.  It's really not practical to teach common sense, for example.  At best, you can approximate common sense by developing and using a 'play book' of good decisions for well known situations. 

We do a great job of testing for these factors in our interview process via the chess log exercise.  Be sure to watch for them as you interview potential co-workers as well.

Practice, Pay Attention to Your Results, Build Experience.  That's how you become better at decision making.