🚀 The Room Where Decisions Are Made
Reflections from a year spent in the room where decisions were made.
I completed a year working on a project that I dearly love - contributing towards setting up a university from scratch. When I sat down to reflect on the year that went by, one thing stood out. It struck me that my professional growth had been directly proportional to my proximity to the decision-making processes. I also realized that it is not unique to my situation and that this could benefit others at a similar point in their careers. Hence this blog.
Let’s start with some more context. I am part of a team that is helping build up a university. My team is small and our function is of high interest to everyone. The project is a collective philanthropic effort, which means that several highly successful founders are putting in their money and time to see it through.
A function of high interest (crafting the founding Undergraduate cohort) ensured that a lot of high-value decisions needed to be taken. These decisions ranged from what the criteria of assessing students should be (and why) to what is the best way of communicating the novel idea of the project with the prospective students. I often found myself in the rooms where these decisions were taken, mostly by design (by virtue of the team being small) rather than from an active attempt towards it.
Being in the room where decisions are taken has worked really well for me. It put me in a position where I could observe, learn and influence - three things that I believe go a long way in building an impactful career. I have been able to put this together only retrospectively, so I wouldn’t say that I knew what I was doing when I was doing it. Reaching this realization involved a lot of trials, most of them filled with errors.
Observe. The first step is to take time to read the room, look around and soak in how things work. Limiting judgments and approaching every conversation with an open mind helped me. If you are like me, there will always be an urge to express your point of view. It was difficult to modulate this urge, but I could see the long-term benefits… I realized that I can participate by actively observing, especially at the beginning. Participation doesn’t only have to be through voicing opinions, especially when they may be half-baked.
Learn. The observation didn’t happen in isolation, I also analyzed and tried to extract my learnings from my observations. The founders that I had access to are people who have built successful businesses by making good decisions consistently. At their level, the biggest asset is their ability to make sense of the chaos. They have been in this ‘room’ for years and their carefully crafted intuition is solid through practice. So if I could learn one thing from them, it was exactly this, ‘how do they make decisions?’.
Observing with curiosity helps create valuable insights. One of my biggest takeaways was when I realized how it is absolutely important to look for data to support your claim and also its counter before being too sure. There was also the time when it struck me how not being defensive while communicating during a crisis can do wonders. These are learnings that hold true even when the context changes. It was important for me to understand these insights and create actionable mental frameworks out of them, which I could use later.
Influence. lo and behold, after you have spent enough time observing and learning, you will reach a stage where you will be confident and aware enough to contribute. The timing will be different for each person. Do it when you feel like it. I started with conversations outside of this metaphorical room - in the peripheries. Each such conversation helped me articulate my thoughts better, understand how people responded to them which in turn created a handy feedback loop that I could trust. This ensured that I had considered several perspectives before I put my thoughts on the table.
Then there was a day when I spoke up and started voicing my opinions in the room, slowly influencing the larger decision-making process with my unique point of view. Once I was confident of what I was talking about, it became easy to get other people to listen. That is where this leads to. This process keeps getting repeated. A series of decisions get made and you keep observing, learning, and influencing - growing.
I can only speak of the validity of this process from a point where you start with the access. What is paramount is getting access to this room where decisions are made. It seems like I have subconsciously made sure that I land up there. Although there have to be ways that could lead someone there, something I will try to write about soon. This blog is already longer than what I intended it to be, so let’s end here for now. Good luck with your journey!
Thanks to Meghna and Sajal Sehgal for reading earlier drafts and Saloni Mehta for helping with ideas and edits.
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