Decide by David Wethey

Author:David Wethey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers

I opened the cockpit door and I walked in the cockpit, and of course there was absolute chaos. There’s a bell ringing, and red lights flashing, and, oh God, and he was pushing his seat out and saying, get in, get into the seat. And I thought, well, there’s too much noise. First thing, cancel the noise from the bell.

Paddy Eckersley, then a Captain with Saudi Airlines. He was flying as a passenger from Jeddah to Casablanca, when one port engine blew up and the other caught fire. His boss was flying the aircraft, and called Paddy to the flight deck to take over. Paddy dealt brilliantly with the emergency because he has been meticulously trained. This is the same for everyone expected to decide in seconds or less. A soldier interviewed on radio about the actions that earned him a military cross said simply, ‘all the training kicked in’.

60 minutes

The average time for a meeting. We can streamline business decision making by making meetings super-productive. The numerous 60 minutes slots we have in our daily and weekly schedules deserve to be given more attention and planning, and to have much more useful outcomes than is often the case.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings: title of Video Arts training film, starring John Cleese (1976). A memorable training programme ridiculing pointless, badly run meetings. It is still there on YouTube, and sadly just as relevant.

60 hours or more

The winning formula: the journey – not the single step. Mapping a decision process, and managing it over the life of a project. Often significant projects start their life as an issue to be looked at over the weekend, or when you are given an outline brief on Monday, and the boss says, ‘let’s talk about it on Thursday, when you have had a chance to think about it’. In all organizations there needs to be the capacity to assess quite big decisions, without having the time needed to do all the necessary consultations, with limited opportunity to analyse available data, and with no possibility of doing any new research. The 60 hours time span is usually long enough to take a view, but insufficient to make a firm decision.

Paddy Eckersley’s emergency (which was both a 60 seconds and 60 minutes challenge)

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