Is your team guilty of making pseudo decisions? These are ideas that sound good at the time, but are ridiculous in retrospect. Pseudo-decisions don’t solve anything; they merely provide people with a fake feeling of closure, give you a quick hit of dopamine and a belief that you have accomplished something.
What does a pseudo-decision look like?
> Delegating a job to someone who is already too overworked to do it
> Agreeing to “try harder” from now on
> Creating a program and not funding it
> Making a decision that will be torpedoed by someone who is not in the meeting
> Agree a policy with no accountability built into it
These ideas all sound perfectly reasonable at the time but when the group attempts to implement them, it soon breaks down.
There is pressure on groups to solve tough problems within tight timeframes. The challenge is to not let the group give in to the temptation to make a pseudo-decision. Instead, support them to keep struggling to integrate each other’s points of view until a viable solution is developed. Encourage them to ask direct questions of one another and assure people that it isn’t confrontational to challenge each other viewpoints.
We’d love to hear about any pseudo decisions you’ve seen or been a part of. Feel free to leave a comment below!