Pros and Cons

I wrote the following as a LinkedIn Article, but I think the idea serves for anyone who uses lists of pros and cons to make a decision.

Yesterday I needed to work through one of those tough managerial decisions that occasionally come up. As an engineering manager most of the managerial decisions are relatively easy to make. There are Nordstrom engineering standards, compliance standards, and many best practices for most of what the developers do. The most difficult part of those decisions is really just keeping up with the standards and practices.

The people management decisions are made using a mix of sympathy or empathy given the situation, past experience, and for me, having a background in psychology. Some of that can be learned, but I think the key is empathy: Put yourself into the position of the employee you are supporting and ask yourself how you would like to be treated in that situation.

I'm going astray from my purpose for writing this, which concerns making those difficult decisions as a manager. I've learned a practice that you all are probably familiar with to help make decisions like these, though with an added element: a Pros and Cons list.

Typically when we use a list of Pros and Cons to making the decision, we use the viewpoint of making a change in the status quo and the effects, positive and negative, that change has on our situation. What we don't typically do is also evaluate not making a change or even not making a decision at all and leaving the status quo. Adding that element to this practice has made creating a Pros and Cons list much more valuable to me in decision making.

I'll use a personal decision rather than a managerial decision as an example: Having bought our condo in Cape Canaveral, I was weighing driving my car to have and use down there versus continuing to Uber to and from the airport there or renting a car when we are there. I made a Pros and Cons list beginning with the positives and negatives of having a car in Florida, including the initial act of driving it down there. On the negative side, it was a very long drive down there. On the positive side, that drive down got me an opportunity to see a good deal of country I haven't seen or don't often see including seeing my cousin in Nashville. (It also meant seeing a lot of Kansas, which I'm not sure quite fit into the assets column.) On the plus side, we would save money. Even renting monthly parking down there, with Jen being an airline employee, was cheaper than a one-way Uber from the Orlando airport to Cape Canaveral. On the negative side it left us with one fewer car here in Colorado, particularly a car for the snow, as we would just have the Rogue and the Camaro.

That's how we all typically do a Pros and Cons list. Then, though, I added the additional perspective of what were the advantages and disadvantages to NOT driving my car down. Some of these were merely the opposite of the first list. We would spend more money when we went to Florida Ubering or renting a car. I would not get to need to make a long drive, but I would also not get to see the middle of Kansas. Then a thought struck me: by leaving the car in Colorado it wouldn't be subject to the salt air of Florida and save some life of the car. Being exposed to salt air is really a negative of taking the car down, but I hadn't thought of it at the time. The different perspective brought that out. Maybe it was that I was geared to see the benefits of a situation more than seeing the disadvantages. Sometimes having that different perspective can help you see that there are more disadvantages to a change or advantages to not making a change than you saw at first. Or perhaps vice-versa if you are more inclined to see the negatives in a situation. 

Ultimately I chose to make the drive down and leave the car. I could always change my mind later and drive back to see how Kansas had progressed in the interim. I'm happy to say that so far the decision to take the car down has been a good one.

There are a lot of managerial decisions I could use the practice on as well. Is this employee best to work on this new system or better off where they are? Does it make sense to update this version of the database now or leave it as is? Should we deploy this new software version in this sprint or do more testing? Put yourself into each situation you are considering and make a list of positives and negatives for each situation in order to gain perspective on your decision.