How to make decisions and own them
As a couple, we have a bit of a decision making dogma; we make each decision once, based on the information available at the time. If the information changes, we are happy to review the decision, but not regret it.
In 2017, we moved from London to San Francisco. We loved our lives in London at the time; we had great jobs, a lovely apartment and terrific friends. It was a tough decision to throw it all in for the sake of adventure. I’d like to share how we actually decided to make the move from London to SF.
We had been talking about moving on from London for over a year. We kept shelving the idea as it wasn’t the right time, or the job wasn’t right. In fact, we had pretty much decided to put it off indefinitely when a new opportunity arose for my husband.
We had a few “meetings” (a.k.a. meals, walks, drives, phone calls, WhatsApp chats) during which we talked around and around in circles about the pros and cons of San Francisco (the opportunity) vs. London (our current location) vs. Dublin (where we are from).
On my birthday, after another long, muddy walk over Hampstead Heath, we realised we weren’t getting anywhere. One minute we would be super keen to move and the next we would find a massive stumbling block in our way. We needed a system to help us organise our thoughts; cue the sticky notes.
Step 1 - What Matters To You?
We needed to identify what was important to both of us.
I am obsessed with the power of sticky notes to help with decisions, so we pulled out a few packs and got to work. We each wrote down the things that we felt mattered to us. One item per note.
We ended up with about 40 different items; these included things like “spending time with our families”,“opportunities for career progression”, “outdoor activities”, “opportunities to explore new places”, “having kids” etc. all stuck to our living room wall.
*This process actually has a name – it’s called Nominal Group Technique (I use it at work a lot).
Step 2 - Identify Categories
OK great! Now let's zoom out a little!
The next step was to arrange these individual items into broader categories.
We ended up with themes like career, family, friends, social, healthcare, accommodation, cost of living etc.
We added different colour post-its to identify the category names so that they would stand out. This part of the process is called creating an Affinity Diagram.
Step 3 - Compare and Rank
Over the next few days, we created a spreadsheet to help us compare the cities.
We created columns for each of London, San Francisco and Dublin (it’s home!) We gave each of the categories identified in Step 2 a row.
We then used a ranking of 1-5 to rate each city against each category. This was based on both experience and guesswork but was good enough to get us through. At the end of this exercise, each city had a numerical score.
* This is called a decision matrix and I love them!
Step 4 – Bring It All Together
We ultimately did not really use the scores that we generated from the decision matrix. I’m still not sure which city won, but the act of generating the categories and discussing and comparing each city against each one really helped me to get my head around the pros and cons of each place and the enormity of moving.
We also used the info that we generated to discuss the move with family and friends to sense check our decision.
It might seem crazy that we went to all this effort and that these exercises and tools didn’t tell us which place to choose, but they did really help. They did help us to have the right conversations to identify and discuss big issues and to feel confident in our final choice, which was ultimately a gut decision.
How do you make big decisions? Have you used anything similar to the techniques above? I’d love to hear them; just comment below!
