Call any company, and seemingly the person you first speak to has neither the mental capacity, nor the privileges to make any decision whatsoever. It becomes annoying then if your query requires them to step away from the idiot proof call flow diagrams they are entrusted to follow. But my gripe with decision making doesn’t just exist in the telecommunicative world, it exists in the real world too.
The inability to make a decision exists everywhere, with people desperately looking at others willing to make a decision on their behalf, and it not just annoys me, it makes me positively angry. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a section of my life where I went through some very specific training on how to make a split second decision that affects whether my trainee and will live or die. Maybe it’s because I’m confident enough to have faith in my decision to be able to justify them later. Or maybe it’s because I’m not scared of the consequences my decision will have.
Inevitably we all make unconscious decisions without a breath of hesitance, why then should we doubt the decisions we make professionally? I wish when people say something, they would commit to it, not because I favour that decision, but because that was the decision they made, and one which I based my actions on accordingly. People like to hide when a decision has to be made; hide behind others, hide behind ‘seniority’ and say the power is out of their hands, hide behind procedure, or just plain old hide.
I find it funny then that it’s these very people that then brag about making a crucial business decision when it has long since been made for them. This pawning of someone else’s courageousness, what a funny decision that is to make.