The Importance of Confidence to Project Outcomes
Prioritizing the projects and initiatives you take on is one of the most strategic decisions you make for your business. And you’re good at it, aren’t you? That’s why you’re the one in the Hot Seat. You make the decision, or the executive team has a big meeting that results in a decision, and everything’s okay, right?
But research from Stanford University indicates that the story doesn’t end there.
Confident Strategic Decision Making
It turns out that the level of confidence you, and the people around you, have in your decision has a really big effect on the implementation of your decisions. To understand this, Professor Baba Shiv of Stanford University’s Management Executive Program, suggests we imagine a military commander in the field. If he is not confident when issuing orders, then the soldiers in the field are extremely unlikely to be comfortable jumping up and storming the enemy position! As Shiv says, “If you are that military commander, you’ve got to be very convinced that the decision that you’re making out there is the right one.”
Now normally in decision making circles, this kind of “blind confidence” is not a good thing. Confidence can contribute to commitment biases and make it harder to reconsider a poor decision. But Shiv argues that there is also a positive side to confidence because it can affect motivation and engagement. As he puts it, “It has a direct impact on what we call the wanting system in the brain, essentially the dopamine system in the brain… and therefore has a direct impact on how motivated you are, how engaged you are in the particular task.”
In other words, decision quality still matters, but Shiv’s argument is that confidence may also influence how motivated and engaged people are when they implement the decision. The video below explores that relationship in more detail.
Confidence and Project Prioritization
So let’s look at the typical project prioritization process. Here’s the scenario; a group of executives sit in a room. One by one, nervous project managers advocate for their projects and the executives beat them up, undermining the need for the project, its likely returns to the organization, etc. These discussions are often little to do with the merits of the projects and are more about the politics within the executive team. In any case, it is the opposite of confidence building. The outcome of the meeting is a portfolio of projects around which there is little real consensus. In fact, there is quite a bit of doubt about the portfolio and, often, outright hostility and resentment about the outcome. Little surprise, then, if the implementation team’s hearts aren’t in it because they suspect the work they are doing is worthless.
So what can we do? Is there a way to build consensus and confidence while simultaneously improving the underlying quality of the decisions? Can we easily improve the outcomes?
Yes!
It’s not rocket science to do the job properly, but a good collaborative process, supported by decision-making tools, can make the reasoning behind the choice much clearer. Analytic Hierarchy Process is a structured decision-making method that can support a transparent, collaborative process, making priorities and trade-offs explicit and helping the team understand what they are doing and WHY they are doing it.
The point is not that confidence guarantees delivery. It is that a team that understands and accepts the reasoning behind the portfolio starts implementation from a very different place than one that leaves the room resentful or unconvinced. See how that played out in practice at Simon Fraser University.
Before you begin your next project prioritization and planning cycle, therefore, stop and consider whether there is a better way to structure the decision and build shared understanding around it.
Have the confidence to try something new.
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