Tonight, as I prepared to cross the road when leaving work, a car was coming in my direction, I thought it was going to turn left, put my feet to the road, he advanced over me, honked, and I had to run for safety. The whole thing was quite humiliating.
My first thought when I emerged on the other side of the road was: this time my decisiveness didn’t work. Which prompted the question: what went wrong? As I thought about this, I realised that there are three steps in decisiveness.
The first step is knowing what is happening. It’s wholly perception. When I looked to the incoming car, I thought it would turn left. But, on hindsight, I realise that its blinkers were not flashing and it was on the right lane. So, it couldn’t be turning left. I just misunderstood the facts.
The second step, once you perceived the facts right, is projection. You imagine what will follow from a particular situation. I thought the car was going to turn left, so I also thought I could safely cross the road. A mistaken perception drove me to a wrong projection.
The third thing is that there is a window of time for action once you know what is happening and what is going to happen next. The only thing to do in this window of time is to move quickly into action. In fact, it’s here that the fast decider shows up. In my case above, after I made a wrong judgement, I didn’t move fast and run into danger.
There is, though, more to decisiveness, which is a clear set of values. This I have learned a long time ago. If you know what you stand for, you know what you must do at any time. If safety were a value of mine, I would have waited to cross that road when the lights were green for me. That would have saved the whole episode.
The final thing about decisiveness is an ability to run risks. This is so because, when you take decisions, and if you do be honest with me, you cannot always guarantee the results. Sometimes, something can go wrong and you are the responsible person, you answer for it.
This shows up especially when the situation you have to take a decision on is out of the ordinary. There you have to be creative and sometimes the results may not be what were anticipated. You, then, are required to have the courage to run a risk.
