Camille Rapacz: Hey, George.
George Drapeau: Hey, Camille.
Camille Rapacz: Ready to make another episode?
George Drapeau: I think so. Yes, I think so.
Camille Rapacz: No, you have to know so you have to decide to be ready. Really know anything. This is not that bad right now. This is not that podcast.
Okay. But I do have a fun pop quiz for you.
George Drapeau: Oh, really? Okay.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. You ready? Do you know where this lyric comes from? This is a song lyric.
George Drapeau: Already. I'm going to lose. Okay.
Camille Rapacz: No, you should know this one. Okay. Here's the lyric. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
George Drapeau: That sounds like either a Boston Legal or Star Trek quote to me.
Camille Rapacz: Okay. It's from a song. It's from a song.
George Drapeau: I'm going to guess. Rush Limelight.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, oh, very good. You got the Rush part, right? It's from Freewill.
George Drapeau: Oh, of course. Same album, I think, right?
Camille Rapacz: I, yes, I think so. Moving Pictures, I should really know this.
George Drapeau: You should know. I mean, of course. That's an awesome quote. And what, how did that come to you?
Camille Rapacz: Because we're talking about decisions once again.
Camille: / Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: / in our last episode, we talked about what makes it hard to make a decision. How do you overcome those obstacles? So today I want to, hopefully we'll make it easier for people. to overcome obstacles and work on their decisions by giving them some frameworks that they can use, because sometimes it's just helpful to have a way to go about it.
So that's why I thought of that. And it's also true. Not deciding is a decision, not always a bad decision. We'll get into that later. Most of the time, it's not a good decision though, to not make a decision. This is going to get very circular, very fast. Let's get into this.
So you know how I love doing a little Google search? Because I just want to see if people go and I'm not doing it because then I'm just copy pasting from Google and then talking about it. I do it because I want to see if somebody were to go out and Google search this topic, what would they learn from it?
And then how can I do better? How can I give them better information? Yeah.
George Drapeau: I think it's awesome that you do that. And I'm thinking like, okay, so now are you either Bing searching this with Bing chat or you chat GPT searching this?
Camille Rapacz: Chat GPT is now part of it. Yes, I did. I totally did. Yeah. Oh, ChatGPT, man, you can get down a rabbit hole in that. Yeah. It gets too, dare I say fun.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Yeah. It's weirdly appealing.
Camille Rapacz: Plus, I love that it has a button where you can just tell it, basically it's a button that just says, stop talking. It says stop generating result. So if it's rambling on and you're like, no, no, no, no, that's not what I want.
Stop. It's like, shut up, ChatGPT. And then you can tell it to do something else. It's very satisfying. Anyhow,
George Drapeau: So what did you ask it?
Camille Rapacz: Think I asked it, you know, what are the top frameworks for decision making? I don't ask it a bunch of different questions about decision making frameworks and what gets in the way and stuff like that.
But I was looking for a list. So I also did ask it, you know, give me a grid of decision making frameworks and, and when they're most applicable, like under what's decision making circumstances, it didn't do a very good job with that. Here's an example. So SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
And. It gave me the answer of when to use it of when you need to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
George Drapeau: It's like a fourth grader explaining a vocabulary word.
Camille Rapacz: That was a pretty lame answer. So anyhow, so that's what I got. So I was going to ask you to guess, like, how many do you think I found when I did this?
George Drapeau: Oh my God. Okay. Let me give you a serious answer. Really, 30.
Camille Rapacz: I don't even have a number. I felt like there were a million kajillion decision.
George Drapeau: That's a trick question.
Camille Rapacz: Well, and part of the problem was some of the answers that came up.
It was a trick question. Part of the answers that came up. There was this crossover of decision making versus problem solving. And it's the same, but also different.
George Drapeau: You know, I get that. And I think that's important because all this stuff is related. I mean, and this is the second half of an episode on a topic about decision making too.
And the previous episode, we didn't cover frameworks, but it's really, I get that. I can see that crossover. Yeah. I mean, not very good for a search engine to reply that way, but yes, so yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So anyhow. The point of this was when I did the search, there were enough results that I realized you could get so stuck trying to make a decision about how you should go about making a decision that you should just not do that.
There were just too many. You're like, should I use this one? Should I use that one? So there were just, there were plenty. I mean, it was kind of nice to see that there's all these different things people have come up with, but also some of them are very complicated.
George Drapeau: Wow. Okay. So I will tell you and the audience, all six of you that I had no idea where you were going to go with this.
I can't wait to see how you're going to guide us about choosing a decision making framework, walking through it and choosing it because this is going to be good. It reminds me of to do list applications. There's a million of them and you can get caught just trying to just try all of them and not pick anything and get more productive.
Yes. You're going to help us with this.
Camille Rapacz: I'm going to try. I'm going to do my best. I think it's a big complicated process here, but yeah, that's what we're really aiming to do is we were aiming to give people just the right amount of information to really just improve their decision making approach and not have to try and deal with the overwhelm of ChatGPTs answers.
George Drapeau: Okay, great. I'm in.
Camille Rapacz: I was gonna start this with making the case. I guess I should make the case.
George Drapeau: Sure, yeah, yeah, right.
Camille Rapacz: Make the case for why do we care about decision making?
George Drapeau: Yes, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: Aside from we're having to do it all the time and it's very stressful, or it can be very stressful. I don't know, some people probably find it easier than others, but really what's happening here is your business is designed and operating based on all past decisions you have made. Literally every decision you make is creating the business you have. So the small ones matter too. Right.
So today we are going to focus more on the bigger decisions that you have to make in business because you don't really need to apply some of these frameworks to straightforward decisions. But as a business owner or a leader in business, having a process for doing this really effectively can really make a difference in the performance of business because it's helping you approach it in a more thoughtful, mindful way, but also enabling you to do that more quickly. So that's really what we're aiming to do is how do we create both a way to make better decisions but also to do them a little more efficiently.
And the other piece of this that I don't want to brush over at all is it's also just good for your own personal well being because we've all done this right where we just ruminated on a decision and we just can't stop but we can't make the decision George has never done that.
Because all the time, but it makes you crazy, right? You're just trying to, because you so want it to be the right decision. Yeah. And so this also will help your own mental state of having a way to approach this. So that's what we're aiming to do in this episode.
The other thing I want to emphasize here is that even if you're making a bad or wrong decision, It most often is better than not making a decision at all . Because when you make a wrong move, it does tell you something important. Sometimes we hesitate to make the decisions because we're so worried it will be wrong. But what's important is to remember that you can still correct that. And, and we're also all going to do it at some point, we're all going to make a wrong move. We all already have in our lives made a bunch of wrong moves.
We're still fine. Okay. Right. Yeah. And, and it's going to be impossible to know if a decision is the right one before actually doing it. Right. You just can't know all the things you, none of us can, you know, see into the future and see all the variables. So all the research in the world, isn't going to tell us whether this decision is going to pan out or not.
But if you have a process for both making the decision and following through on that decision, it does increase your odds for success. And that's what we're here to do. We're not going to achieve perfection, but we will definitely increase your odds for success in making good decisions.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I mean, this also bring back clearly other belief shifts that you mentioned. So make a decision. And then instead of critiquing yourself, you take a curiosity approach to learn from that. Right. Yes. Oh, yeah. It makes it easier for you to decide you're going to make mistakes.
Just be curious about it. Don't criticize yourself.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So yeah, I'm gonna ask you some more about belief shifts in a minute too after I go through this next thing. So I'm glad that you went there because I definitely wanna pull these out so thank you. Great minds, thinking alike.
So when you think about making a good decision, George, what's top of mind? What do you feel is, if I'm gonna make a good decision, I need to fill in the blank.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. The first thing that comes to mind is not like, do you have a decision making framework?
Although I have some for different kinds of decisions the first thing that comes to mind is thinking about when somebody tells me, hey, I'm leaving the team I'm taking on this other job. And then I asked them, do you feel like you've taken a good risk? Is this a good decision for you?
Are you going towards something or running away something? So have you thought through. What it looks like for you. Does it match what you need? So I guess what I'm thinking is, do you have some criteria that you apply when you're making decisions? Let's guess what that boils down to. Okay. That's top of mind.
Camille Rapacz: That's great. And you're right. I don't think a framework or a process necessarily is the first thing we think of. We're thinking of something else I don't. I do. Yes. Of course you do. So
this is what I want to impart to the whole audience here, which is the first thing about making a good decisions is to just have a process for it. And not just for the decision itself, but also for executing on it. Cause one of the things I see happens is even if we are good at getting to the decision that we don't have good follow through on those decisions.
I see this happen a lot where, wait, I heard in this conversation this last meeting I was in that we made X decision. So why are we doing that now?
George Drapeau: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Right. You see this a lot like, oh, cause we're not doing good follow through on this decision because we don't have a good process for it are also because we're a little bit scared. And we're kind of trying to not put all of our eggs in one basket. And well, maybe I can do a little bit of both. And that's not always the best thing to do either.
George Drapeau: You're right. A decision not followed through is not really a decision.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I mean, why isn't that a Rush lyric? Come on. That would have been excellent.
George Drapeau: But I totally forgot about this. And that's one of the most frustrating things for me I've seen in corporate corporate life is big group spends all this time makes a decision and then they just Pay attention to it. Like what? You're right. Oh, yeah. You didn't really decide, did you?
Camille Rapacz: No. And you know what that means for all the people working in that company. Right. So it might make sense to the leader. Like I know exactly why we're doing this. And I've seen this happen. Like, I know the leaders know exactly why they're doing it. And they can think in these very complex strategic ways, but the people that are just doing the work on the ground, middle management and down, they're like, these guys don't know what the heck they're doing.
That's all they see. Right. They're just like, you don't know what they're doing. This looks crazy. This doesn't make any sense to me. So obviously they don't know what they're doing. Sometimes that's true. And sometimes that's not, sometimes there's a method to their madness, but regardless when we do it, it does have this appearance of what a mess.
And that we're not true to our word because we make a decision and then we're not really following through on it. And these are all bad things to have happen in your company from a cultural and morale perspective. Yeah. Not not good at all.
George Drapeau: No, they're horrible. You're right.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. So we want to tackle both of these problems, both the, the art of making the good decision and then the actual execution of it.
Yeah. Okay. So most of the frameworks I found out there really do just focus on the actual decision making part itself to solve this particular problem or close this gap. And that makes sense to me. Cause that's usually what we fret about the most. It's just, do we make this decision? Did we make the right one?
And some of the frameworks, they're going to be better for really simple decisions versus more complex. That's why there's so many, cause there's so many different types of decisions to be made. So it makes sense to me, you know, when you think about it. I'm glad that there's lots of different frameworks because they're not all decisions are equal, but it just can be confusing and overwhelming if you're really just wading into this and you're already feeling anxious about like, I just need to make a decision, but now I have to make a decision on the framework to use to make the decision.
Ah, too much, right? Yeah. So whatever you choose to do, whatever you take away from this. Again, you know, my mindset is always smaller is better, and doing something is better than doing nothing. So if you're just trying to be thoughtful and take some time to study your decision before you leap to it, before you have a knee jerk reaction about it, if you're doing that, you're already ahead of the game.
Similarly, in the other direction, if you're hesitating and you have all these decisions, you're just holding back on them. If you use this as a way to make some steps forward and maybe just start by making some smaller decisions, then you're also already ahead of the game.
So we're working from both angles of this problem, which is I might rush to make decisions too fast, or I might be just dragging my feet and not making decisions fast enough. So we got to hit this middle ground what's the sweet spot of the right amount of time to take to make a good decision?
All right, so let's start with the overall framework.
This is where I was going to ask you about belief shifts, George, so you already brought one up, but there's a couple more because you brought up the curiosity one, which I think is hugely important. Definitely curiosity over self criticism is significant in decision making. Yeah. Because the self criticism is often why we're hesitating we're going to beat ourselves up if we make the wrong choice.
George Drapeau: It is for me. Yeah. And it is something I have to think about for sure. Yeah. And I got pretty good self esteem. So yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. This is true. I know this to be true. Yeah. So what else? Yeah. There's two more that I can think of, but what can you think of?
George Drapeau: You know, don't cheat. Don't look. Don't realize. So my words for one of the belief shifts is no spaghetti, no spaghetti on the wall. So planning it over winging it, no spaghetti, no spaghetti to simplify this belief. I don't know why that's what's in my, I guess that's my mnemonic. I didn't even thought about it.
So I think planning over wing it. I mean, that's the whole point of this. We're making decisions.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. And so what we're talking about in terms of planning, it is process over outcomes instead of obsessing over whether I get the right decision or not focused on the process of not just making it, but executing it.
George Drapeau: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's all over that.
Camille Rapacz: All right. So again, I want to emphasize, we are talking about fairly complex decision making.
So things like, should I pivot my business in this other direction in order to get more growth? Or should I be making a change in my marketing strategy? We're talking about big stuff. We're not talking about the little things like, what should I work on today? Or what should I have for lunch? You know, yeah, that kind of thing.
Part 1: Steps for Making Good Decisions
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Camille Rapacz: So to start, let's just talk about the basic steps for solid decision making. I'm just focusing on the process of making the decision itself, and that's mostly what we're going to focus on in this episode.
I'm not going to get much into the actual, I've talked about executing. We've talked about how that's important. That's going to be another episode, or this is just going to take too long. So this one, I just want to focus on the actual decision making itself. Cause that's really what the frameworks focus on.
Are you with me? Yes. Okay. So basic steps for solid decision making look like this. Okay.
Step 1: Identify the Problem or Gap
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Camille Rapacz: It starts with clearly identifying the problem or the gap. What is the decision I actually need to make and why does it matter? Because if I don't have clarity about that I'll never make a decision. It's too wide open. Sometimes I think we're thinking about making a decision about something, but we haven't really gotten clear with ourselves about why it's important. So we might be hung up on making a decision because somebody else told us we needed to do it, or we're seeing other businesses do it, or it's just something that's presented itself, but we haven't taken a minute to do that as we talk about often reflection on wait, why is this decision matter?
So what is the problem I'm trying to solve in my business or the gap I'm trying to close with this decision?
George Drapeau: You know, this one, I think I agree. It's the first thing you got to ask. And it's really important. But when I try to talk to people about this, and sometimes when I think about it, I think like, really, you're that's, that's the thing you have to think about?
Trying to figure out what problem you're trying to solve, but all the time. And recently at work, I've run into this where somebody has presented the slide deck with some changes they want to make. And I'm part of this group that looks at this and we're like, why are you doing this? I mean, yes, it's a change.
I get the change. I can see that you're listing all the benefits, but like. I've literally heard this question. What problem are you trying to solve exactly? Because otherwise I have no idea why you're making this. Yeah, I, I agree. It doesn't seem obvious to me until you actually think about it for eight seconds and you got to be clear about what problem you're trying to solve. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So I just want everybody to sort of be open to this idea that it's very common for us to go into creating solutions. Cause frankly, that's just more fun because it's creative, right? I'm creating, I'm like, I have this idea and I have that idea. And sometimes we just jumble them all together into a presentation or a decision.
That's the fun part. But what happens is if we start by just doing that and creating ideas without being clear about the problem we need to solve or that gap we need to close, then this is just, it's spaghetti. It's just a bunch of stuff. I mean, it might be cool stuff and you might be able to sell it as a really cool idea, but if you aren't really clear about what it is you're trying to get to, then it's hard to come up with a really crisp and clear solution.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I agree.
Camille Rapacz: And this is sometimes where decisions go wrong because then there's too much built into it. Like, well, now we're trying to do everything and the kitchen sink all in this one decision, which really is again, kind of not making a decision because we're just trying to do all the things, all the cool ideas.
So it starts with this clarity of what is the problem? And that in itself is not an easy mental exercise for lots of people. So it can take some practice it takes some training and this is actually where I find as a coach and a consultant, I can be most useful in organizations because I'm coming from the outside and I don't know their problems as well.
They're living them all the time. So they're like, well, of course this is going to solve these problems. But when I really get into questioning them to make them get clear about stating it. They get more clarity about the problem in a way that they can't really do on their own, we get stuck in our own, can't see the forest for the trees kind of is the problem.
George Drapeau: That's cool. I got, I get it now.
Camille Rapacz: You get why my job exists.
George Drapeau: Well, I think of you as like overall capable and being able to go and spend a week with a client do all kinds of stuff with them. But like that first step of just saying, Hey, look, let me help you just identify what problem or problems you're trying to solve.
Just that, yeah, you're right. A lot of people really can't do that for themselves. And I'm not even, we're not even talking about root cause analysis, but that's what you're going to do. You're going to help them reveal what's the real problems here. There's huge value in that. And even if you stopped there, some organizations or some clients or some people, that would be enough for them to make good progress on their own.
Just that, that's enormous. Yeah. I mean, it's really cool.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. It's true that really just getting that kind of clarity about lots of things in your business. That can really be this big relief valve, just opening up all this potential and opportunity in a business just to have that bit of a different perspective.
And it's something that we find as we're running a business, it's really hard to take time to do that. When do we stop doing the work and reflect on the work. So that is number one.
Step 2: Set the Criteria
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Camille Rapacz: And then number two is where what you were talking about comes in, which is I need some criteria. So what are the outcomes I actually want from this? What are the parameters? Like there's going to be acceptable, not acceptable scenarios or results. You might say, you know what, I'm okay if this happens, but ideally it doesn't. So you need to establish these criteria of how this decision delivers on solving the problem or closing the gap.
So it's not enough to just know what cause you're not going to have a perfect answer. So we have to have some criteria so we can say, how do we get to the best answer for my business and for my situation. So establishing criteria is number two.
Step 3: Do Research
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Camille Rapacz: And then you do the research. Usually we start with the research because it's the fun part, Oh, I need to do a, like you said, I need to do app for managing my task list. I'm just going to start researching cause that's the fun part. And I'm going to start experimenting instead of, what do I need it to do?
What do I actually need to do first? So yes, then you can research after you've done steps one and two, what are all these possible solutions and choices that could be considered. And open it up to what are all the possible scenarios and solutions because processing through the ones that aren't the right ones is a helpful exercise.
Being able to weed out, that one's not right for this reason, and that's not right for that reason. It also is a good test of, did I establish the right criteria? So even though I'm kind of laying out a linear process as I talk about it, it can go back and forth. So I might get to number three research and say maybe I didn't establish my problem as clearly as I thought.
So definitely go back and improve the problem statement and improve the criteria, whatever works. So research is number three.
Step 4: Make a Decision
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Camille Rapacz: Number four is where you actually make a decision. Bum, bum, bum. So you can use the criteria and the problem definition to help you with now that I have all these options, which one do I pick?
And this step, this number four is where we're going to talk about frameworks in a minute. Cause you're like, just make a decision? Isn't that the whole problem is I still don't even know how, even though I have all these criteria, I still might not know how. So make a decision is four.
Step 5: Make a Plan and Take Action
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Camille Rapacz: Number five is then you make the plan for how you're going to implement this decision, which I'm not going to go into a bunch of detail yet in this episode, but you make a plan, you take action.
Step 6: Evaluate and Improve the Outcome
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Camille Rapacz: And then the final step is to evaluate and improve on the outcome. Okay. That is your full process. For decision making, because making the decision doesn't count if you don't implement it.
Which is another lyric somehow of decision not implemented, never existed, like with the tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it. If a decision was made, but nobody implemented it, did the decision actually get made? I say no. That's funny. No. Okay. You know, we're not the best at the jokes, but we try, we try people.
/ And that feels like a great place for us to stop for this episode because we kind of go on and on about the decision-making frameworks. So I'm going to hold that for the next episode. So please tune in to the next one when we will talk about step four, which is making the actual decision. And we'll go through some frameworks and help you with how to do that. In the meantime, I hope that you will use these five steps to make some better decisions in your business or at your work.
And also I would love it if you would leave us a review on Apple podcasts. But you can also just leave us a voicemail. If you just want to say, Hey, maybe give us some ideas for topics you'd like us to talk about or leave us some feedback. We'd love to hear about it. You can leave us a message at thebeliefshift.com. There's a little widget on the side where you can click, leave a voicemail.
And last, but most importantly, if you want some help with better decision-making than just book a free consultation with me and we'll talk about it. You can go to camillerapacz.com/bookacall. There'll be a link in the show notes for this, and you can book a free one hour conversation with me and we'll chat about it and see if there's some ways that I can help you out. All right that's all for this episode thank you so much for tuning in and we will be back in your ears next week.
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