Bad Decisions Don't Kill You

I used to work as a contractor for a company - they hired me because they were really struggling to get someone qualified to do the job.

After a while of doing the job, they made me salaried because it was expensive to have me as a contractor.

Then because I was salaried with other members, they then had too many members of staff for the short term demand.

So they made my manager redundant.

This changed my relationship with the company, and I left.

Now they’re short-staffed again - needing exactly what they started with, a contractor, and paying nearly double to get one.

Another contracting story comes from someone I know who was working for a big coaching company.

The head of the company had a conversation with their accountant and realised that the company weren’t doing as well as they thought they were.

They let this coach go because they were just a contractor.

This coach was really popular and now people want to leave because the coach is gone.

The business will now get worse as a consequence of this.

Although these stories sound like a conversation about contracting work and the balance of finances in a business

They’re actually stories about how good businesses destroy themselves one reasonable decision at a time.

Bad decisions don’t kill you - we all make them.

What does kill you is the snowball

This is what happens when you make a decision that looks reasonable in isolation, but awful when compounded over time - and when the second and third order effects are considered

Decisions that look obvious from the outside but invisible when you are inside, and that is the trap you cannot see your own snowball.

So the most important thing you can do as a coach is to climb out and look on purpose.

What’s going on in my business?

What decisions am I making?

What am I missing?

You can’t see that from inside the work.

It’s the whole reason I do a quarterly review - to get above my own decisions and check where the string of them is actually pointing.