From Shane Parish’s Decision Making Course
Establish Correct Automatic Behaviors
The Automatic Behavior: Determine the automatic behaviors in advance so you don’t have to decide in the moment.
When a project is failing or an emergency hits, do you and your team already know how you’ll respond?
When things get hard we often panic. Stress makes us forget our true objectives, lose sight of options, and narrow our thinking about the future. We get so committed to making something work that we refuse to let go even when it hurts for us to hold on. Or we forget the most important thing altogether.
When things go off course and we’re emotionally zapped is not the time to try and make complicated decisions. Masters of decision making know we need to help our future selves by making some decisions ahead of time.
This is a technique I see used all the time by people I consider exceptional decision makers. They make automatic rules so they don’t have to make decisions.
Not only do correct automatic behaviors help us avoid poor decision making, they can also help us feel calmer and clearer when we’re waiting as long as possible to decide on our consequential decisions.
When you know in advance: “If this certain event happens, here’s how I’ll respond” you no longer have to ruminate on the decision in a stressful situation. You can spend your energy elsewhere.
We get overly fixated on achieving outcomes and start to make terrible decisions in times of stress. Rather than rely on our decision making skills in the moment, it’s better to create automatic behaviors in advance that remove the ability to make decisions when we know we are unlikely to make good ones.
The process for creating automatic behaviors has 3 components: Tripwire, Empowering our team using Commander’s Intent, and Tying our hands via a Ulysses pact.
Tripwire:
A tripwire is deciding in advance to take a course of action when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance.
While you’re in a great frame of mind with the time and space to think clearly, let’s commit to what you’ll do when you see
- Negative signs.
- The absence of positive signs.
- And positive signs.
We’re also going to include the absence of positive signs. Meaning, things haven’t gone wrong, but they haven’t gone as expected either.
This is where most projects fail and decisions get challenging — when we fall in the middle. If you don’t see positive signs you’re moving closer to your goals, it’s time to re-evaluate.
Is the most important thing still the most important thing? Were you wrong? What will it take to reach your goals now that you’re closer in time, but not closer in progress? Do you still have the right information? Are you having to navigate unexpected consequences?
I want you to plan a tripwire and response for the lack of positive signs. What are some indicators that you need to re-evaluate your decision?
Example:
When we decided to start a YouTube channel of clips of our podcast content, I identified some measurable goals. I then came up with tripwires so that my decisions wouldn’t be skewed by emotional attachment to the content, sunk costs, or a few really harsh reviews.
I started with two goals: Having a certain number of subscribers within a year, and receiving feedback that the content was helping people. As I went through the tripwire identification process, here’s what I wrote down:
Negative signs our YouTube efforts weren’t working:
- A low amount of subscribers
- A critical mass of terrible reviews
- Watch time, which is the percent of a video the average person watches.
So my tripwires for these situations were:
- If we don’t have x subscribers within 3 months, we stop.
- If our ratio of good reviews to bad ones is anything lower than 3:1, we stop.
- If people don’t watch 30-40% of videos, we stop.
I applied the same parameters to considering the absence of positive signs:
- Gaining subscribers sporadically with lots of churn.
- No bad reviews, but no really good ones either.
My tripwires for these scenarios were:
- If our churn rate is over 20%, reevaluate our content.
- If we don’t have x good reviews within 3 months, reevaluate our content.
- Watch time of 15-20%.
Finally, I outlined the signs of my best case scenario:
- 50,000 subscribers in one year (I picked an optimistic but achievable amount)
- Consistently fantastic reviews
Here were the tripwires I used to flag when we could up our investment in the channel:
- 20,000 subscribers in 3 months, on track to hit the year target.
- 100 number of great reviews in the first 3 months, demonstrating our content is resonating with viewers.
For me, setting tripwires is invaluable, because we all face moments in our decision making that cloud our judgment. Tripwires help us stay on track to attain our most important goals.
Now it’s your turn. Keep in mind while doing this exercise, that a tripwire doesn’t always mean that you have to take action when you hit these points. It could mean that you need to revisit your objectives and goals, or just to check in.
The second technique for establishing correct automatic behaviors is to empower others to act.
Great leaders know things often don’t go according to plan. They also know they can’t be everywhere at once. Teams need to know how to adapt when circumstances change. What if they lose their leader? Or encounter an unexpected obstacle?
Giving a team enough structure to successfully carry out a mission, but enough flexibility to respond to changing circumstances is referred to as Commander’s Intent. A military term first applied to the Germans who were trying to defeat Napoleon, it has four components: formulate, communicate, interpret, and implement.
The first two, formulate and communicate, are the responsibility of the senior commander. You have to communicate to your team the strategy and rationale (not just the what and the why, but how you arrived at your decision so they understand the context), and the operational limits (what is completely off the table).
Subordinate commanders then have the tools to interpret changing contexts to try to implement the strategy. Continuous feedback is important, and so is recognizing the individual capabilities of your subordinates.
Commander’s Intent empowers each person on a team to initiate and improvise as they’re executing the plan. It stops you from being the bottleneck. And it allows the team to keep each other accountable to the goal without you present.
If you’ve been on the inside of a business where employees can’t take action until everything is approved by their boss — you’re seeing what happens when there isn’t a commander’s intent. If something happens to that CEO, the business and mission fail.
So, ask yourself now:
- Who needs to know your goals and the outcomes you’re working towards?
- Do they know clearly what the most important objective is?
- Do they know what tripwires are in place and what will occur if those tripwires are met?
The team should know the objectives, tripwires, and limits before you begin executing on a decision, so there’s no confusion as you move forward.
One of the signs that you’ve failed to empower your team to work towards your goals is if you can’t be away from the office for a week. You shouldn’t have to be available 24/7 for decisions to be made and objectives to be achieved. If you can’t be away, it doesn’t mean you’re indispensable, it means you’re a poor communicator.
Another flag that indicates you aren’t confident in your ability to give your team the right framework for executing tasks and making decisions, is if you insist on controlling the ‘how’ of everything. Good leaders set the ‘what’ and the parameters to get there. They don’t care if something is done differently than how they would have done it. As long as it respects the limits and advances to the objective, they are satisfied. Poor leaders insist that everything must be done their way, which ultimately demoralizes their team and undermines both loyalty and creativity. The exact opposite of Commander’s Intent.
Ulysses Pact.
In the fable, Ulysses’ clever implementation of the correct automatic behavior allowed him to both hear the Sirens and make sure the crew survived the ordeal. He used commander’s intent and tripwires, and he leveraged his brain while it was at least halfway working to prevent him from making poor choices when it didn’t work at all.
That’s why leveraging your decision making power in this way is called a Ulysses pact. It’s tying your hands to the mast to follow through with the behavior you want to implement.
Examples:
In dieting, that might mean throwing out all the junk food so you don’t have any in the house to resist.
In investing, that might mean creating automated deposits each month.
In the example of climbing Everest, a Ulysses pact could be the agreement from everyone in advance to turn around if they weren’t at the halfway point at a certain time.
When we practiced deciding backwards, we got clear on the actions we need to take to reach our outcomes.
Ulysses pacts are a great way of deciding in advance how we can fulfill those actions without extra energy in the future. So think now, is there any way to figuratively tie your hand to the mast for the decisions you want to implement?
By thinking through our options and not just planning, but committing to courses of action— we free up space to tackle other problems.
How can you apply this professionally?
- If a new employee hasn’t demonstrated positive performance at 1 month, you set an automatic performance evaluation or dismissal. (Tripwire).
- If a new product launch doesn’t meet the low end of the sales threshold, you kill it. If it has more traction you rapidly invest. (Tripwires).
- If you are starting a new project, everyone on your team knows the most important thing, so they can make decisions when you’re not around. Everyone knows the goal and the limits they need to respect. You communicate not only your strategy, but how you arrived at it, so your team understands how to interpret and navigate any challenges that arise.. (Commander’s Intent)
How can you apply this personally?
You can set correct automatic behaviours for the type of person you want to be before you are in the situation. Remember to make them rules. For example:
- I have a rule that I only have two drinks during the week. This way I don’t have to decide when I’m out with friends how many drinks I’ll have.
- I have a rule that I only eat dessert on the weekend.
- Spend 15 minutes after the kids going to bed checking in with your partner before doing anything else.
- If the stock market goes down 5% in a day, you trim your exposure ten percent.
- Automatically deposit 10% of your paycheck into a separate account.