Good Decision Making Starts With Asking the Right Questions

A Marine Corps intelligence lesson that every leader needs: don’t just trust what you know—interrogate how you know it.

Serving in the USMC for 25 years has given me some deep insights about mission accomplishment and leadership. What I'm going to share here is one of them... 

As an intelligence analyst, my job was to figure out how things work and to hopefully help prevent bad things from happening. We looked for warnings and indicators, made predictive assessments, and designed target packages through systematic analysis. One of the first things analysts learn is that decisions need to be based on real data: evidence > emotions. If I did my job well, I could walk into a briefing room and say, “Here’s the situation, and he’s what we know…”

But that is only part of the equation. One other part is one I think a lot of people overlook or take for granted, leading to real problems in their analysis and decision making:

Asking, "What do we know?" is useless without also asking, "...and how do we know it?"

The veracity of any assessment–any inquiry at all–is only as good as the quality of our sources and our interpretations of the data. Assumptions are seductive. Emotions are loud. But neither makes you right. You can think you know and still be dangerously wrong if you never interrogate the lens you’re looking through.

My intelligence assessments were required to include an “analytic confidence” rating to signal the reliability of the information. High confidence meant it was based on high quality information from multiple, credible sources with little to no conflict among them; moderate confidence meant the information was plausible but not sufficiently corroborated or of high enough quality to warrant high confidence; and low confidence meant the information was fragmented or unverified.

In other words, we had to stop and ask, “How do we know what we think we know? What else could be true? Where’s my source? What am I not seeing?”

This isn’t just about battlefields. You make decisions every day that can change the course of your business, your relationships, and your life. If you’re only giving energy (and if you think you’re right, probably investing a lot of energy) to what you think you know, you’re missing a huge part of the decision making process.

We all want to believe we’re making sound decisions. But if we’re not examining how we’ve come to believe something—if we’re not checking our assumptions, our sources, our filters—we’re not leading; we’re reacting. And reactive leaders (especially emotional ones) are a liability.