Get Your Team to Stop Second-Guessing Decisions

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HBR Blog Network
Get Your Team to Stop Second-Guessing Decisions
By Nick Tasler
Not long ago, the division head of a multinational manufacturing company had a problem. After receiving
an aggressive 12% annual growth target, she met with her team, and after a lot of research, meetings,
and debates, they built a strategic plan around 17 key initiatives ranging from the overhaul of a production
facility in Nebraska to fully integrating a new distributor in Nigeria. Everyone on the team was on board
with the plan, and they were optimistic about its outcome. But just a weeks before the start of the fiscal
year, they began to doubt their abilities to execute so many initiatives at once and they started second-
guessing their overall direction.
What happened? Was it a case of performance anxiety? Was the plan truly flawed? Was the team just
being lazy or disloyal?
None of the above. The team lost commitment because they suffered from a very common problem
called planner’s remorse.
Just like the buyer’s remorse people feel after buying a car or a house, planner’s remorse is the natural
sense of regret we sometimes feel after buying into a plan. It is the same psychological phenomenon that
gives fiancés cold feet and causes negotiators to back out of deals during the cooling-off period.
Immediately after deciding to pursue a course of action, we often experience a kind of euphoria because
switching gears from contemplation to action activates a different part of our brains. But the bliss is
fleeting. After a few days, our brains very predictably return to normal and euphoria gives way to remorse.

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The big difference between buyer’s remorse and planner’s remorse is that the performance of a car or a
house doesn’t change based on how we feel after we buy it. But the performance of a plan does change
based on the attitude of the people implementing it. If a management team is wishy-washy about a
strategic plan, they can rob themselves of the psychological commitment they’ll need to execute
effectively, as well as the enthusiasm they’ll need to get everyone else onboard.
It turns out, however, that our brains are wired in a way that allows us to transform planner’s remorse into
planner’s resolve.
A series of experiments (PDF) by Gergana Nenkov and Peter Gollwitzer showed that deliberation has
very different effects on our minds depending on whether it happens before a decision or after a decision.
On the positive side, all those discussions about the benefits and costs of pursuing different alternatives
in the planning stages help us to arrive at more rational decisions. But deliberation can also erode our
commitment to the eventual plan we decided on by planting seeds of doubt that blossom into planner’s
remorse later on.
Thankfully, there is a way to avoid the negative effects of extensive planning. Nenkov and Gollwitzer
found that if you take part in the same debates after creating the initial plan, you can actually
increase your commitment. After you’ve decided on a course of action, discussing pros and cons forces
our minds to defend the decision. Believe it or not, our defensiveness helps us achieve our goals by
fostering grit and perseverance.
This phenomenon explains why I find myself so often facilitating what can only be described as post-
planning planning sessions. On the surface they seem totally redundant. After all, the team has already
held a strategic planning session, so what’s the point of another session? But what Nenkov and
Gollwitzer show us is that the timing of that post-session session is as crucial as the content. When it
happens shortly before we need to execute on the plan, it can provide an adrenaline shot to the team’s
commitment.
Of course there is always the risk of succumbing to the irrational bias of “escalation of commitment.” What
if that defensiveness makes the team too committed to the plan? Focusing the post-planning planning
session on the first 90 days instead of the entire year helps minimize that risk because it forces the team
to recheck their assumptions in another three months. But escalation of commitment is still a possibility.
On the other hand, would it really be all that bad if your biggest concern this year was too much
commitment from your team?