184 | Two Great Decision-Making Techniques for When You’re Stuck Between Two Options

If you ever find yourself going round and round in circles when you're trying to make a decision at work, this episode of HR Coffee Time is here to help, especially if the decision that you're trying to make involves choosing between two options.

So perhaps you're trying to decide something like whether to recruit externally or promote someone internally within the organisation you work for, or maybe it's whether to introduce a new policy or stick with what you already have.

Perhaps it's whether to stay in your current role or apply for a new job, whether to invest in a new HR system or try to make your current one work.

Or perhaps it's someone else who's asking you to help them with a decision.

Maybe a senior leader has come to you and said, "We need to do either this or that.

Which option do you recommend?" When you find yourself in one of these situations, it can be really tempting to put all your energy into weighing up the two options in front of you by thinking about things like, what are the pros and cons?

Which carries the least risk?

Which will people respond to best?

Which one can we afford?

And they're all completely valid and helpful questions to be asking yourself.

But there is a different way of approaching this that can be extremely useful.

It's based on ideas from Chip and Dan Heath's brilliant book, Decisive: How to Make

Better Decisions, and I only realised recently that I'd used some of these ideas in their book by accident, but they helped me to get unstuck from a decision that I had just been going round in circles about for ages, and I'm now really happy with the choice that I made.

So I wanted to share them with you in the hope that they might be as helpful for you as they were for me.

So I'm going to start off by telling you about the decision that I had been struggling with, and then what it is that I eventually decided to do and, of course, what helped me to get there.

Then I'll explain how, without realising it at the time, I'd actually used a couple of the ideas Chip and Dan Heath share in their book Decisive, and they helped me to get unstuck.

Then finally, I'll give you some practical ways to widen your thinking when you're faced with a difficult decision at work.

If we haven't met before, hello, it's brilliant to have you here.

Welcome back if we have met before.

I'm your host, Fay Wallis.

I'm a career and executive coach with a background in HR, and I'm here to help you have more influence, confidence, and impact at work while building a career that you love.

So let's get started.

The decision I've been struggling with was about the Essential HR Planner.

If you've been following me for a while, you'll probably know that every year I publish the Essential HR Planner, a planner that is created especially for HR and people professionals to help you stay brilliantly organized, make a fantastic impact at work, and keep progressing towards your professional development and your career goals.

So it helps you with all of those things.

And there are some huge advantages to doing it that way.

Amazon prints each planner on demand, so it means that I don't have to order hundreds of copies up front and just hope that I've guessed the right number, because if I get that number wrong, I can either end up with loads of unsold planners and then a huge printing bill that I have to pay, or I end up with people upset that the planners have run out and they can't buy one.

Amazon also handles all the orders, the deliveries, and the returns for me, and they mean that I can sell the planner worldwide.

So it all just makes the whole process way easier for me to manage.

But before moving to Amazon, the planner used to be in a wire-bound format, and over the past few months, quite a few people told me that they really miss that wire-bound version because the wire binding means the planner can lay completely flat while you're using it, and you can fold it back on itself so it's just easier to write in, and it takes up less space on your desk.

So I started wondering whether I should bring the wire-bound version back because I want to make sure that you absolutely love the planner and it's as helpful as possible.

But the idea did fill me with dread because when I have got the quantities wrong in the past and I've either ordered too many or too few, I've just ended up feeling horribly stressed about the whole thing.

So I was just completely stuck on overthinking this.

I couldn't make a decision.

In my head, the decision was, do I bring the wire-bound planner that people have been asking for back, or do I just stick with the much easier and lower risk Amazon hardback?

I kept going backwards and forwards, and I just couldn't seem to make a decision.

I'm not a hugely decisive person as it is But eventually, I decided to follow some of my own advice.

I often say to people to ask for feedback when they're trying to make a decision or get feedback on a strategy or a plan that they're working on.

And because I really wasn't sure how many people would prefer the wire-bound version, I thought, 'Well, I need to ask more people about this.'

Because if it's just a few people, then I'll carry on self-publishing with Amazon.

But if it's loads of people, then I knew that would steer me towards going back to using a traditional printers again and having a wire-bound version and just ordering the planners in bulk and then selling them myself instead of through Amazon.

So I posted on social media asking everybody what version they'd prefer, and I also asked the question in my weekly email newsletter And the response was amazing.

Hundreds of people took the time to reply.

Thank you so much if you were one of those people.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your feedback.

And one of the people who replied was my friend Claire Cathcart, who I actually know through this podcast.

We first met a few years ago when she was a guest, and she came up with a suggestion that I just hadn't considered at all, but it was so good.

She recommended, why don't I order a limited run of wire-bound planners, base the amount that I order on pre-sales?

So I'd say to everyone, "If you would like to have a wire-bound version, please pre-order it so I can get the right number from the printers." And then for anybody who ends up missing out on the wire-bound version because they sell out, then I can offer a hardback still through Amazon, so that way no one misses out.

It just might be that some people who might have preferred a wire-bound but didn't quite get round to ordering one or find out about it, well, they still get to have the hardback one, which hopefully is still lovely and really helpful.

And then that way I'm not in the stressful position of having loads of planners that aren't needed or not having enough planners when people really want them.

So as soon as I read Claire's suggestion, I knew it was the right answer.

If you're watching this or listening to it, Claire, thank you again so much for your help.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

And looking back, the solution seems really obvious, but I just hadn't been able to see it because of the way that I'd framed that decision.

I'd convinced myself that I only had two options: create the wire-bound version of the planner or have the Amazon hardback version.

The mistake that I'd been making when I was trying to make the decision on my own is something that is called narrow framing.

Narrow framing is a really common decision-making trap, and Chip and Dan Heath explain it in their excellent book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions.

It happens when we get so focused on the options in front of us that we start to assume they're the only ones available.

This takes us straight back to those examples that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode.

So decisions that you might be thinking about at work, things like, "Do I recruit externally or promote someone internally instead?"

"Do I introduce a new policy or stick with what we already have?" Do I stay in my current role or apply for a brand new job?

Do we invest in a new HR system or do we just try to make the current one work?

There is nothing wrong with weighing up those options, with thinking about those different possibilities.

The problem is that once we frame the decision as either A or B, we can become so focused on working out which one is best that we forget to ask whether A and B really are our only choices.

And that is exactly what happened to me with the Essential HR Planner.

I thought my decision was wire-bound or Amazon hardback.

So I kept trying to choose between them.

What I hadn't asked myself was, what other way could I approach this?

Until, of course, my friend Claire pointed out what another way could actually be.

So the next time you find yourself saying, "Do I do this or that?" Or, "Should we do this or not?" Treat it as a prompt to pause.

So before you start weighing up the pros and cons, just pause, because there might be another option that you just haven't seen yet.

And Chip and Dan Heath share a brilliantly simple technique for helping you find that missing option, so you don't have to just rely on the luck of having a friend comment on a social media post.

It's called the vanishing options test.

So when you're trying to make a decision and you keep going round in circles just between two options, the vanishing options test is a brilliantly simple way to help you break out of that either/or thinking.

The idea is this.

Imagine that both of your current options have disappeared.

They're just not there anymore.

You're not allowed to choose either of them.

What would you do instead?

Chip and Dan Heath share an example in their book that feels very relevant to the kind of decisions we can face at work that can feel really hard.

So they change the names in the story, but it's based on a real situation involving a manager called Margaret and an employee called Anna.

So Anna was good at the administrative parts of her job, but she really struggled with the much more social, front-facing part of the role.

And Margaret, her manager, had got stuck between two options.

She could either carry on with a situation that wasn't really working and keep Anna in her current role, or she could start what would be a long process that might eventually result in Anna leaving.

So Dan Heath asked her to imagine that neither of those two options was available.

She couldn't just carry on as things were, and she couldn't pursue the route that might lead to Anna leaving.

What else could she do?

And once these two options had effectively vanished, Margaret quickly came up with a completely different possibility.

She realised she could change the way that the work was organised so that the front-facing responsibilities were covered differently, and Anna could focus more on just purely having an administrative role, the administrative work that she was much better suited to Now, of course, that doesn't mean redesigning someone's role is always going to be the right answer in a situation like this.

The important part is what happened to Margaret's thinking.

That's what we're focusing on here.

So when she believed she only had two choices, she was completely stuck, but when she was forced to take both of those choices off the table, she was able to see another possibility.

So the vanishing options test really comes down to one simple question: if neither of the options I'm currently considering was available to me, what would I do instead?

And sometimes asking yourself that question is enough to just unlock a different way forward.

But if you're still stuck, there is another thing that can really help, and this is the thing really that helped me, and that is getting someone else to look at the decision with you.

Getting someone else's perspective can be incredibly useful when you're just stuck on a decision, because they might be able to see options that you simply can't see yourself.

And I often think we feel like we have to solve all our problems ourselves or make our own decisions, but one of the points in the book is that other people can often see options that we miss because they're not as close to the decision as we are.

And of course, that's exactly what happened to me with The Essential HR Planner.

I had spent ages thinking about wirebound versus Amazon hardback, and I just couldn't see beyond those two choices, but my friend Claire could.

She wasn't as close to the decision as I was, so she was able to look at it differently and suggest a much better option that just hadn't occurred to me at all.

And I think there's a really useful lesson in that for decisions that we're making at work.

So when you ask someone else for their input, try not to only ask which of these two options do you think I should choose, because that can accidentally keep them as well inside the same narrow frame that you're already stuck in.

Instead, you could ask them questions like, "What am I missing here?

What other options can you see?

Is there another way I could approach this?" Or you could use the vanishing options test with them as well and say, "If neither of these options was available, what would you suggest instead?" Sometimes the other person, of course, won't come up with a better option.

It's not always going to be a magic solution, but sometimes they are going to spot something that just feels completely obvious once they've said it, but that you just couldn't see because you were too close to the decision.

So the next time that you're going round and round in circles between two choices, don't assume you have to think your way out of it on your own.

Ask someone else to help you to see what might be missing

If you enjoyed the ideas that I've shared from Chip and Dan Heath's book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, I would really recommend reading the whole book.

I'll include a link to it in the show notes and the YouTube description.

It's a fantastic read, and that way you can find it really easily.

I'm a big, big fan of Chip and Dan Heath's work.

Made to Stick and Switch are two other books of theirs that I've really enjoyed and that I'd highly recommend, and I know they've written other books as well that I really want to read.

And if you're watching or listening to this episode close to its release date, you should now be able to pre-order the wire-bound version of the Essential HR Planner that I've been talking about today.

You can find it at my planner website, which is a bit different to my regular website.

So it is essentialhrplanner.co.uk, and of course I'll pop a link in the show notes and the YouTube description for you.

And finally, if you've found the episode useful, I would love you to let me know.

If you're watching on YouTube, you can give the video a like or leave a comment underneath the video.

It's always so fabulous to see that.

If you're listening to the audio version, I can't tell you how much I'd appreciate a rating or review in whichever podcasting app you're listening to it in.

It's just wonderful when I see feedback like that and receive those.

So thank you so much if you've already done any of those things or if you go on to do it, and thank you so much for joining me for this episode of HR Coffee Time.

I really hope it helps you get unstuck the next time that you're faced with a difficult decision, and I'm really looking forward to being back again in two weeks' time with the next episode for you.