The problem with watching 'Mad Men' right before you go to sleep is that it rattles around your head all night, disturbing your sleep and occasionally inducing sweat.
As I flipped around like a dolphin last night I couldn't help but sleep-ponder about decision making. In a creative industry, there's no hard and fast rules about what will make an activity a success. Marketeers require conviction to turn an idea into reality and need to then intelligently evaluate the outputs, refining the approach for future endeavours.
When there isn't a clear answer, I turn to variable analysis. I balance risk against reward and known against unknown. This is how I make decisions. Analytically. I used to think that if you showed your team, and in fact your clients, the workings of your analysis, then they would naturally reach the same conclusion as you.
I don't know about this any more. Not everyone is an analytical thinker and not every person wants to make decisions all of the time. Often people want to be led. They want to be sold to. They want to be told what is right. As humans, we do not have infinite processing capability. Some times, we are happy for others to do the hard work.
And this is my conclusion from my restless night of sleep. Leadership is about being more than logical. It is about inspiring others. It is about having conviction in your ideas and then making them a reality. The trade off is that the risk/benefit analysis and associated burden is one that you must manage on your own.
