Not every decision you make will be universally popular. If you aren’t careful then you might focusing on the people who are onboard, it’s often easiest to spend time with those who liked the outcome.
If you fall prey to this temptation, then you’ll miss out on opportunities to make your decisions better in the future, and you’ll also risk only ever hearing the good stuff. Feels good for a while, but bad news tends to get worse if you ignore it.
Hearing concerns is a key technique to balance this risk. You’ve got a decision made, and you spend some time hearing from the people who didn’t feel like they got a good outcome.
Listen to those concerns. Are they merely repeating the expected outcomes? If so, you might push towards “disagree and commit”. It’s usually better to make a good decision and get moving than it is to never make the perfect choice.
You might choose to add something to your decision. Maybe the concern is linked to a secondary metric or an unintended consequence. In this case you can add some extra measurement, or add a review process to ensure the concerning outcomes are well managed.
Rarely, you might choose to change the decision somewhat. Something significant has been raised, a new stakeholder group identified or there’s a wider change in the environment. If you find it’s not rare, then you need to look at how you are gathering information and recommendations to make decisions. Consult with these new stakeholders earlier, or add sources to the input of your decisions.
No matter the choice you make or the outcome off the back of it, by taking the time to hear the concerns of people who are less onboard, you fix some of risks of just pushing on blindly.
We aren’t endlessly opening the door to revisit the decision, so put your efforts on explaining what is going to happen and why that choice has been made. Make sure to reference the concerns that have been raised, so that you can show they’ve been heard, and outline how they are being addressed.
Decisions are worth nothing without implementation, so hearing from those who are holding concerns can help you be more likely to be successful now, and in the future.
James Osborn 