Deciding how to decide
The combination of Christmas holidays and cold weather is always a great opportunity to spend time at home with my children playing board games, reading or catching up on my Watch later Netflix list
Last month in Madrid one of those afternoons that thermometer marked -1 after a walk seeing Christmas decoration and enjoying later a delicious chocolate with churros with my family, we went back home
While my children were catching up with their challenges in Brawl Star ☺️I started to watch the last episode of Black Mirror.
Black Mirror is THE TV show that generates in me the most varied mix of feelings, I like it, but it scares me; I think what scares me most is that the future that presents does not seem so unreal. It does not seem so far. And that scares me. The last chapter was a different chapter, a sort of experiment with the audience. It was a chapter that had multiple endings, depending on the decisions I made.
The concept of the episode was interesting; with the TV remote control you choose the future of actions, and there were multiple endings. The structure of the episode reminded me enormously of certain books that I read in my adolescence in which the reader chose the end of the book based on the decisions made
This episode of Netflix made me reflect, but this time I did not think about the episode itself, I did not think if what we were told in Bandersnatch is something that would happen in the reality or not. The episode made me think about decision making.
While I was watching the episode, I kept thinking about which options should I choose? , this option or this one? There were times when I answered intuitively, others I thought the answer ... the fact is that as I saw the episode I asked myself.
What is my decision-making process? How do I decide something?
This simple question, took me to a reflection and to realize something ...
I do not have a systematic approach decision making process. And that is something, that if we apply it to the world in which I work it is clearly an area of improvement.
How do I decide if this vendor is better than this other?
Which languages are the most suitable to translate our app?
What is better buy a commercial license for a TMS or create one internally from scratch?
As a result of realizing that my decision-making process has room for improvement, I was reading and studying (check Conor Neill material to know more about leadership, his channel is awesome!) during Christmas about how to create a framework that will help me make more reliable decisions.
Of course, nothing can guarantee me that I will always succeed and that the decision I make is the best one, but simply increasing my self-awareness about the fact that I do not have a good decision-making process is useful; Before that Black Mirror episode I did not really stop to think what parameters I have in mind to decide something.
“A survey by “McKinsey Quarterly” found that 60 percent of executives make bad decisions as frequently as good ones”
Read here the report about Flaws in strategic decision making: McKinsey Global Survey results
Below I share with you my learnings about what we might consider to create a framework for decision making.
Click here to download the infographic!
I hope that at this point of this post these reflections are giving you food for thoughts on the subject of how to decide what we decide. But before saying goodbye to you I want to stop and reflect on the top 3 of the main causes that slow me down most in my decision-making process:
1. Fear of being wrong and being perceived as a fool in front of my colleagues
2. Fear of deciding something now and finding a better solution later
3. Fear of repeating a mistake from the past
All these fears can lead me to inefficiency and procrastination. Watching a Netflix episode is not a big deal if my decisions are bad (they were the first time I interacted with the protagonist of the episode, but I do not give more details to avoid spoilers!) or if I procrastinate; that will be fine, it’s just watching TV; but in the real world we may not have many opportunities to return again and again to the previous situation and decide something different; For this reason it does not seem a bad idea to devote our time and effort in developing/improving our decision-making system.
I hope that the content shared here will be useful to make you reflect and ask yourselves how do I decide the things I decide? What processes/steps do I follow?
Have a good week and do not hesitate to comment below how you make the decisions you make!
@yolocalizo
In this blog post, I imagine three roles that could become as popular as the Social Media Manager did: AI Workflow Localization Manager, Localization Data Curator and AI Localization Quality Specialist
These roles blend human expertise with AI, pointing to a future where localization jobs look very different from today.