Of two minds

Mind Duality, a photo by h.koppdelaney on Flickr.

She uttered the dreaded words, "On the other hand..." and her husband groaned.  "I'm trying to be responsive to what you want," he complained, "but you keep changing your mind!  Help me out here!"

You hear it all of the time - political candidates are skewered in the press with accusations of "flip-flopping" on issues.  Then when they are elected, some of them are criticized for being immune to the influence of evidence that flies directly into the face of their firmly set convictions.  Is it better to be consistent, or to be able to see and even argue on behalf of multiple perspectives on an issue?

Consistency vs. Flexibility

If you want to lead effectively,  you attract followers and commitment when you are consistent. 

Spaced repetition increases the retention of your message, so consistency becomes important in helping people remember you and your priorities.

If you want to be consistent you have to have some overall fundamental principles upon which you base everything else.  Followers attach themselves to the ideals, the philosophies, that you put forth.  Then new information should be filtered through the principles to see how it aligns, and decisions made based upon the filtered data.

But what if the new information contradicts the old information?  Doesn't a well-educated person run the risk of contradicting himself or herself?  In a word - yes.  But that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Closed-mindedness and inflexibility in thinking can cause a leader to make 19th-century decisions in a 21st century world.  Sometimes new information has to influence priorities going forward.  And it becomes important for the leader to identify - and communicate - the new information that is transforming his or her thinking on a topic.

Obviously there are pieces of new strategically impactful information that would be dangerous to share far and wide, but the effective leader shares what he or she can, even with those individuals who are outside the group of "need to know" team members.  Only when team members outside the inner circle understand the leader's priorities more completely can they fully align their efforts with the leader's intended direction.  And the more quickly the direction is changing, the more important frequent communication becomes.

Two minds and decision making

Sometimes inside the leader's mind there's a tie between two priorities, and that leads to a delay in decision making or a waffling back and forth between different options.  Ultimately the leader has to have a method to break the tie - either an overriding principle, or a trusted person or team that helps to tip the scale in one direction or the other.

Decision criteria can help to process a choice.  Here's a simple example:  when determining what home improvement tasks are most important prior to placing a home on the market for sale, the criteria might include:

• Safety
• Curb appeal
• Energy efficiency
• Adaptability to a variety of buyers

The leader scores each project (1-10) against the identified criteria, and then whichever project achieves the highest score is done first.  When there are multiple people involved in the process the criteria screen can still be used - either a consensus score for each item is identified, or scores from all of the individuals are tallied to determine an aggregate for each of the criteria.

Ultimately nothing happens unless a decision is made, so the more protracted your process is, the longer it is going to take you to achieve the results you want.