Decide Better!

Recently I posed the question on whether the time it took for President Obama to make his Afghanistan decision was procrastination or deliberation. Now that the decision has been made and announced, we can examine the process itself, thanks in part to the comprehensive exposé by Peter Baker in the December 6, 2009 New York Times. Presidential decision making, particularly for difficult strategic decisions, is one of the most important qualities of a president. Only time will tell, or we may never know, whether this turns out to be the right decision, but it does illustrate the characteristics of a thorough and rigorous strategic decision process; one that can serve as a good case study for strategic business decisions.

Obama made everyone on his team work long and hard on the decision. The process was methodical and rigorous, taking three months of regular work to review and evaluate alternatives. He separated the critical parts of the decision process into steps: deeply understanding the problem, evaluating the alternatives, revising the alternatives, discarding alternatives, considering the implications of the final choice, and building support from his team before it was announced. He met 10 times with his national security team to understand the facts, frequently asking penetrating questions, asking for additional analysis, and suggesting new alternatives. During this process, the president gained a very deep understanding of the situation and the implications of the decision. In a decision this complex it would have been a mistake to shorten the process to a single meeting. Coming to a quick decision based on intuition or gut feel would have rendered a completely different decision and one that may not have been well considered.

The president spent a lot of personal time on the decision, not just listening to the opinions of his advisors but also shaping his own opinion. In too many cases in government and in business, the chief executive is too busy to get deeply involved in major strategic decisions. This is usually a mistake. The leader making the final decision needs to listen to advisors in major strategic decisions, but not let them make the decisions.

Sometimes a complex decision process is too rigid: “here are the alternatives, pick one”. But this one demonstrated the importance of how complex decisions evolve. As this decision progressed, the objective was refined. It evolved from destroying the Taliban to diminishing Taliban insurgency and transferring authority to the Afghan security force. The objective as also expanded to include the timing of withdrawing troops more quickly. Refining the objective is a characteristic of complex strategic decisions. As the alternatives are better understood, objectives can be refined to better match the realistic restrictions of alternatives, as well as the additional possibilities alternatives may present. About half way through the process, the president discarded one alternative, withdrawal, because he believed it wasn’t viable. This enabled attention to focus on the remaining alternatives.

At the same time, it is important that alternatives also evolve and take shape. In a strong decision process, it is not just “pick from the alternatives presented”, the leader making the final decision shapes the alternatives. This is an integral part of this decision. President Obama wanted to consider an alternative for 30,000 troops not just 40,000, and this was called alternative 2A. When reviewing this alternative, he again expressed concern that it would take too long to deploy the troops. He wanted to “move the bell curve” to the left: deploy more troops faster and withdraw them earlier. The team also took time to validate some of the assumptions in the alternatives. For example, General Petraeus confirmed that the surge could be done in six months similar to what he did in Iraq. Afghan president Hamid Karzai confirmed that he was comfortable with taking over security responsibility faster.

On the day after Thanksgiving, the president presented to his team a revised alternative 2A with a different shape of the deployment and draw down bell curve. He continued that meeting from 10:30 AM to 9:15 PM, refining the plan until everyone was in agreement. He specifically asked all of his advisors if they were in agreement, and they all responded positively. Building agreement is another characteristic of a good strategic decision process. In some ways this is the opposite of a consensus. A consensus implies including the opinions that everyone came in with. Building agreement in this case came from participation in the process. Everyone went through the process, made their thoughts known, discussed the alternatives in depth, and reached a common understanding of the facts, assumptions and alternatives. A good strategic decision process builds agreement among those involved in the decision.

The president also used this final meeting to outline his announcement. The announcement of a strategic decision like this itself can refine some of the details of the plan. For example, care was taken to define and present this strategy as very different from the one in Vietnam. In addition, President Obama also established boundaries on the next review of this strategy, making it clear to the military that in December 2010 he would only consider flexibility in the draw down, not the draw down itself.

Whether you agree with the president’s decision or not, or how it turns out in the long run, it does provide a case study of the characteristics of a thorough and rigorous strategic decision process that can serve as a model for complex strategic decisions in business as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.