Sure vs. Sound

For three weekends, Kerry carried the same decision down to the waterfront.

She would walk along the shore until the noise in her head thinned and she could hear herself. She'd made a hundred significant decisions this year, her third year as Senior Vice President of Clinical Transformation. She had learned to say, “Let me sit on that,” and it had served her. But this decision she’d been sitting on for three weeks, and the sitting wasn't producing wisdom.

The call was who would be her number two. The search had run for five months and had come down to two finalists. Choosing the operator from inside risked keeping the company what it already was. Choosing the builder from outside risked the culture that was worth building on. Good reasons and good people sat on both sides.

Her shoreline walks didn’t hand her certainty. Each weekend she returned to her car with the decision unmade, a little heavier. Both candidates were waiting, and one of them wouldn't wait much longer.

On our video call, I asked her two things. First: If you choose and are wrong, what would it cost to undo? A wrong hire could be undone inside a year, at a cost that was real but survivable. Then the second: What information was still coming that would change your answer? The interviews and references were done. Kerry had learned everything she was going to learn. She had been waiting to feel sure before deciding, not for more facts. It was time.

She took a breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she laid out the situation in two minutes, clean and clear. The logic held. It had been holding for three weeks. What never arrived, and was never going to, was the surety she wouldn’t get the decision wrong.

Somewhere in the climb to SVP, Kerry had come to believe a great leader was one who didn't get it wrong. So she gathered and she waited. She called this diligence, when it was really the fear that someone would look at a bad call and decide she didn't belong in the chair. But the chair had never required certainty.

She made the decision that week. She chose the builder. She could have told you exactly why, but could not have told you it was right.

Kerry had assumed a sound decision would explain itself. Within the month, the finalist she passed over came to her ready to leave. She did not counter. She told him she had chosen the risk she was better prepared to manage, not the better man. She had weighed him for five months as a candidate but never once as the man who would have to live with her answer. He stayed.

Sure is a feeling you wait for. Sound is a case you can make.

The Question

What decision are you carrying, waiting to feel sure, when you already know everything you are going to know?

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." — Voltaire