Squiggly sprint 24: Day 8 - Judgement

It’s day 8 of the SquigglySprint and today’s article was on Judgement.

In my field of customer support, it is very common to have to make snap decisions. You may have multiple issues ongoing, and you need to make a decision on which is the most important, based on limited information. 

Especially when you are spinning many plates, it can often be more important to work quickly. After all, the time that you are spending trying to get the perfect answer on one question is stopping you getting any answers on many other questions.

It is very fashionable these days to be data driven. While I certainly aspire to that in many ways, I have also seen the bad side of making decisions based on data, namely that people demand more data to prove proposals that they don’t want to do than they do for things that they want to do. The classic case of “Bring me a rock” 

For this reason, I have a healthy skepticism of relying on the data, and worry that many companies are forgetting that their people are often more accurate at predicting the future than a spreadsheet. That’s when you start to enter the world of instinct and emotion.

One of the nicest things a former boss and mentor said to me was “You have good instincts. Trust them.”. This has served me well in my career, being naturally inclined to work quickly and intuitively. That serves me well in the often unstructured world of a support function. In fact, I often say to people that I manage that they have all built up enough credit with me that they should feel comfortable to make a decision when they feel that time is of the essence. If they make the wrong call, I’ll respect the initiative, and help them learn from it. 

While I appreciate the feedback from Helen and Sarah in today’s episode that sometimes one needs to be careful of trusting the first thing that pops into your mind, sometimes that is all you have time for. The most important thing in these cases is to not beat yourself up for having the trust in yourself to make a quick decision, and always taking the chance to learn from it afterwards.