Build #60 - Alleviating decision-making load for founders
Hey there,
This week in Build I’m looking at a favourite topic of mine: decision-making.
Most of the founders I work with are grappling with the challenge of shifting to a wider group of people making decisions.
They’re doing this because they typically face a relentless onslaught of decisions every single day.
Constant decision-making leads to decision fatigue.
And they recognise that to be able to grow their business they need to share the load.
After making too many decisions, the quality of the choices you make deteriorate. Your cognitive resources get used up. You struggle to weight up and make the trade-offs needed.
Your prefrontal cortex is central to rational decision-making and cognitive control. Repeated decision-making exhausts this region of your brain, reducing its ability to weigh long term consequences.
At the same time your right anterior insula is computing the subjective value of your mental effort, integrating signals about cognitive fatigue from your pre-frontal cortex.
When you’re tired, there’s greater connectivity between these regions, skewing your decisions toward the lower effort options. If you hadn’t been so fatigued, you would have weighed the options differently.
Prolonged cognitive activity also depletes glucose in your brain.
This is the brain’s fuel so this affects your pre-frontal cortex function and self-control. There’s also some evidence that your mental load affects glutamate buildup in your brain, disrupting the efficiency of your thinking.
Put simply after a day of constant decision-making, your ability to make the best calls is declining..
Each decision you make taxes your self control and wears down your ability to make subsequent decisions effectively.
Your brain is tired.
In my coaching work, I’ve seen patterns among founders that include:
- Indecisiveness and struggling to make choices, even on the small things.
- Going with the easy default option instead of evaluating alternatives
- Less self-regulation and poorer self-control
- Declining quality of decisions and making increasingly problematic choices
- General irritability, distractedness and inability to concentrate
If some combination of these ring true for you, there’s probably some decision-making fatigue at play.
When that happens, I often ask founders to think about decision-making fatigue in two dimensions: the personal and the company.
For them personally, there are some quick fixes to try.
They can arrange their days so that they make big decisions when they are mentally fresh. Using genuine mental breaks to rest their brains can provide opportunities for mental recovery during the day.
Once they’re aware of decision-making fatigue, they can be more alert to the signs like indecisiveness or impulsivity. Then they can avoid making big decisions when they spot those signs.
They can also use habits and routines to reduce the mental load of low priority decisions they have to make.
But for the longer term health of the business, it’s about sharing the decision-making load with the right people who are competent and trusted to make decisions.
That’s why a business operating system is one of the most powerful antidotes to founder decision fatigue.
By codifying things like behaviours, processes and priorities into clear guidelines and decision-making frameworks, founders can limit the number of ad-hoc choices they need to make each day.
At its core, a business operating system has these key building blocks:
- Purpose and principles that act as a common decision filter
- Priorities and goals to align effort and resources on what matters most
- Roles and responsibilities to empower autonomous decision-making
- Processes and playbooks to streamline execution
- Tools and systems that automate routine tasks and decisions
With these core elements in place, you can create a framework for making decisions at all levels of your business. It establishes intentional guidelines, processes and automated systems to handle the majority of day-to-day choices, reducing decision-making fatigue for founders.
And the bonus is that this then frees up your decision-making capacity to focus on the highest impact, strategic issues that really require your attention as the founder.
Essentially you can reduce your mental load, helping you make fewer decisions but also make them better. What busy founder doesn’t want that?
If you’re a founder grappling with this, drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about how you can build the operating system you need.
best regards,
-sw