Most people think of decisions as right or wrong, 1 or 0, all or nothing. But decision is more complex - right or wrong are probably not the best way to look at them.

Decision making is about managing a range of outcomes. Of balancing or hedging outcomes within a range of probabilities. That’s essentially for two reasons:
- no decision should be looked at in isolation. There is usually no single “press of a button”. There are many decisions that are taken on a project (or strategy) that should be looked at as a system - and that gives you variables that you can play with to manage desired outcomes and risk.
- And then there is implementation. And implementation of the decision is key for success, for the desired outcome. I have seen (probably) bad decisions that produced great results, because the whole team (including the decision maker) performed brilliantly and made it work.

So, my stance is that decisions should always be looked at systemically, their outcomes as a range and implementation as key for success of any strategy or project.

P.s - And “timing” is a whole new book…

This is a battle we can't lose

Recently, Chris Wedding pointed out that “If we only talk about climate change in terms of protecting ecosystems and future generations, we have already lost the battle.” He points out that we need to change the approach to the tremendous impact climate change is already inflicting on us. Now!

This makes sense. The human brain was essentially designed (or, more precisely, has evolved) to solve immediate, urgent dangers – we automatically prioritize those, even if we desire to tackle the longer term challenges. So, bringing forward the huge health, living conditions and economical costs that we are already experiencing from climate change is an imperative – from a communication standpoint. You want to win the climate change battle? Change the perspective from “future” to “now”!

P.S- If you want figures, let me just point out the 820 Billion usd the US population spends annually on health costs (+ lost wages) because of pollution and climate change (this comes from a Morgan Stanley study). In Europe, the tally sums 140000 preventable deaths from climate change over the past 40 years (over 9000 of which in Portugal – that also lost €13.5Bs in the same period) – these figures coming from the European Environment Agency).