“First, find the facts.” (DON’T)
This is a common piece of advice given to anybody in regards to decision making. This is simply ineffective, and perhaps wrong. In making decisions, one needs to start with ‘opinions’ first. Before you could start investing time to gather and analyze data (facts), you should be able to have a criterion that qualifies and disqualifies an area of data. An opinion can be considered a criterion of relevance when trying to validate a decision.
Here are four important headlines in regards to looking at opinions first:
Opinions are based on experience
Balanced and Mixed Set of Opinions
Challenge the Opinions
Hypothesis = Opinions
Opinions Come from Experience
For the most part, opinions are based on experiences—not just any experience, but experience from folks who are familiar with the subject. You may have a circle of consultants, colleagues, or staff members who can help guide your investigation towards the right direction.
Good leaders, who have to make a decision, rely on trusted individuals who have experience in the matter. These leaders know which individuals in their organization have the right background and expertise to provide a sound opinion on the topic.
Ask for opinions, not the facts. When you start asking for the facts from the start, these individuals would naturally gather facts that is biased on their opinion. That (fact) alone should stop leaders in doing this practice. How can you trust biased facts? What’s the point of making a decision if you’re already fed information that supports one direction? Ask for opinions, not facts.
Balanced and Mixed Opinions
Having a balanced circle of individuals to provide these opinions is crucial. A good leader should not have a team of individuals with a singular approach in the matter. This type of environment creates a confirmation bias. In fact, it’s important that there are disagreements among the opinion givers. Disagreements are necessary for leaders to make the right decision. (We’ll talk more about disagreements at another time.)
Have a good mix of people around you. To make a decision on what main course to serve in a banquet that would cater to the palate of a mix crowd, don’t ask a bunch of Italian chefs for their opinions. Be sure to have a well-rounded team of consultants who’ll provide you well-thought, educated opinions on the matter.
Opinions serve as a filter to your search for information. In coming up with information around the decision you need to make, you’ll need to first qualify the requirements and the scope of what you’re looking for. You don’t just go blindly considering all the facts to make a decision. First, the sheer amount of information you’ll have to sort through makes it almost impossible to get done. Next, a vast majority of the information you’ll have to sort through is irrelevant to the topic you have to decide on.
Challenge the Opinions
Those giving the opinions are responsible in making sure their opinions are well-thought and actionable. There are those who are great in thinking of ideas, but they haven’t even given any depth of thought into it. Leaders should require them to define “what factual findings can be expected and should be looked for.” (The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker)
Challenge the opinions. Don’t accept loosely-thought opinions. Opinions need to be backed-up with experience and a sound path for testing. If an individual cannot consistently provide such opinions, you should consider coaching them or remove them from your circle of consultants.
Opinions = Hypothesis
Any scientific experimentation starts with a hypothesis. Educated guesses help qualify the types of experiments that need to happen to prove the validity of the hypothesis. A good hypothesis can be tested. This means that it’s important that the opinion givers are able to provide ways to test their opinions. Simply stating an opinion, without well-thought arguments around it, is not enough.
The decision-maker then listens to all the opinions and the actions needed to test those opinions. It’s now up to the decision-maker to pick which opinions to start testing, if not all of them.
Crowdsourcing FTW
Have you made a decision based on opinions first? What other benefits do you see if focusing on getting the opinions first before the actual facts?