Decisions and Consequences

"You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start." - Everlast, What It's Like

(This article is part of an on-going series dedicated to developing Agile mastery. Each post offers value to students on this journey, however, there is an advantage to those who start at the beginning.)

WIIFM

Building on the previous article on Decisions and Outcomes, how you think about the outcomes and the more insidious consequences to your decsions will have a significant impact on future success. As I said, you cannot not make decisions. And for better or worse, your decisions will have both outcomes and consequences. The questions are will you make good or bad decisions? Are you willing to accept the consequences? Read on to find the answers.

For this article, I'm writing about decisions and consequences. But...aren't outcomes and consequences the same thing? Yes. And no. For an intuitive feel of the distinctions, imagine you've been working to persuade a group of people to take a particular course of action. After your pitch, you get the following questions. Notice your emotional response to each of them.

• If we do this, what will be the outcome?

• If we do this, what are the consequences?

The common response to the question about outcomes is more positive than the question about consequences. In my experience, people associate outcomes with things they'll get whereas consequences are things they'll have to pay a price for or lose. Outcomes are general cases, more expansive, and imply opportunities. Consequences are specific cases, constrictive, and imply something negative. Outcomes, good. Consequences, bad.

I've found it helpful to think of consequences as a subset of outcomes. It's also perhaps the most important subset when working to predict outcomes. Working out consequences depends on the quality of your first, second, and third order thinking skills. Time to get to work...

5 Ways to Uncover and Assess Outcomes and Consequences

1

I've written previously about the importance of understanding opportunity costs and how to go about identifying them. Determining what your desired outcomes are carries a price, a cost. And that cost is all the other things you won't get by pursuing a particular outcome, the opportunities you can't or won't explore because you've made a decision to follow a particular path on which the other opportunities won't be found. Choosing a ski vacation in the Rocky Mountains means you won't be surfing any waves in Hawai'i.

2

Scanning for consequences is an iterative and dynamic process. It's an on-going effort, if you intend to get good at it. In my experience, this means getting good at using the OODA Loop. In particular, the Observe → Orient phase of the loop will shake out an abundance of potential consequences.