Lessons - The 13 Superpowers Behind Every Great Decision | Atif Rafiq - Ex-Amazon, McDonald's, Volvo

In this lessons episode, explore a practical framework for making better decisions and driving meaningful progress inside organizations. Discover how structured exploration surfaces critical insights before action, understand how alignment replaces silos with clarity and shared ownership, and uncover how disciplined decision processes improve execution, accountability, and long-term outcomes. So this process, I think it's broken down to a few different pieces, so I want to make sure that we're all on the same page. So this process, I mean, in this book there are 13 different superpowers that I guess are the core concepts that people have to think about, but then it's even drilled down to an even more simple framework of exploration, alignment, and decision making. So I want to understand how those two concepts play. So when somebody thinks, say somebody looks at this and we're going to talk about some of these superpowers, we're going to talk about this framework in a second, but when somebody thinks about superpowers, what does that mean for them? These are the attributes or the skill sets or the soft skills, hard skills, what are superpowers? But then also that framework, I want to go deeper into that framework as well. Great. So high level concepts are basically, first is the idea of upstream work, first downstream, downstream everybody understands. That's where we have the decision point, we have the decisions, and it's like let's go, let's make a project plan and let's execute. But I think we can all relate to the fact that we spend weeks and months trying to get to the decision point and getting our organization to say yes. And so this upstream part is broken down into three phases, exploration, alignment, and decision making. So let's take them one by one. So exploration is a concerted effort to surface the really important considerations, especially the unknowns and get to the bottom of them. And you do this by starting with questions. Questions are very democratic, they're very inclusive. You can give four people from a company, they have different roles, different jobs, and you put an idea in the center of the table. And the first thing that comes up will be all kinds of really interesting questions. To me, that's gold. That's not skepticism and you know, that is actually high quality input to say, hmm, what are the unknowns around this, what seems to be a promising idea. You want to do a good job of creating space for that. And you want to collect those questions before you raise ahead to anything else, like having a judgment or an opinion or yeah, trying to align on what to actually do. So exploration creates space for getting all the right questions on the table and trying to get to the bottom of them. That's phase one. The second phase is using the exploration to draw conclusions. If you're standing on high quality information and you said, okay, there was a bunch of things that we had questions around, you know, here's the sort of the discovery that we did. And now we're in a position to say, well, what conclusions would we draw from this? You know, what makes sense? Then you look at those conclusions and you try and bring people together to say, do we have alignment? And generally, you'll find that people say, well, based on this fact base, we've, you know, this is, these are some conclusions that we draw. And usually that's pretty layered. It's not just, oh, this is a good idea or a bad idea. It's many things. It's, yeah, we should do this idea, but we should also keep in mind X and Y. And so people, you know, it's really important to spend time, say, okay, what do, what do you see in your eyes? And do we see the same thing? When, once you're complete with that, that's when you're ready to drive action. And you say, well, based on these conclusions, what, what actions do we need to commit to? And that's where you usually are parting with dollars and resources. You know, you're walking through one way doors sometimes, right? You're saying no to, to other ideas. And yes, to this one, that is the time for action. So in the book, I break this down further into 13 workflows where you could, you know, sort of set these up in your teamwork and basically create a path from, you know, idea, promising idea to the decision point. And hopefully that improves the company's ability to say yes to the right things and know to the things that deserve a note. So ultimately, at its core, not to oversimplify the complexity, but as core for people that are just wrapping their mind around this concept, it's a decision-making process with a built-in feedback loop. And that can be executed. So my question, is that correct? Is that like a good summary of it? Is that oversimplifying significantly? If it is, I apologize. Because nobody, some people, some people have knock on into this level of depth when it comes to decision-making yet. And I mean, you're talking to a range of individuals. And some people are just starting to make these big decisions for their business or trying to figure out, okay, at what point do I start incorporating this? Is this something that I work with a small vendor? This is something I should incorporate. I should put an exploration phase out to the business, to my co-founders, should talk to them. Or is this very specific, useful for very certain larger decisions that move the business forward? It definitely applies to companies of all kinds. Although, you know, you know, if you're on the smaller end, you know, five people or ten people, probably some of this can be done, you know, very informally through conversation. But once you start to get, if you will, functions in a company, you know, that's, or any sense that there are any silos, then you need something otherwise, you're leaving it to chance and personality. The good way to summarize this is basically, it's a method which promotes exploration, promotes starting with questions, and suspends judgment on what to do. Because the human mind, as you know, there've been some neuroscientists who have written about, and I talked about this in my early chapter, around the way the brain works, there's system one and system two, and system one is for a very quick decision making. You're in the forest, and the tigers there, do you defend yourself for run kind of thing? And there's system two, which is much more about thinking twice about something, and which allows you to see a little bit more of the picture. And the kinds of work we do in companies, especially around innovation, is much more system two oriented part of the brain, where you need to think twice about it and question it in order to see more of the inputs. Now, human nature, and especially in companies, you know, depending upon the personalities and the culture of the company, you can be using system one, but you need to be using system two problem. Yeah, that's a big common occurrence in companies, right? Because people might think, oh, my job is to know exactly what the right thing to do is at all times, but that's actually not the case. The better way to look at leadership is to know how to ask the right questions or get the right questions on the table. And another thing that I'm thinking people would have a big concern with, not in terms of the process, but in terms of their own organization, is you mentioned something, you mentioned this is great to solve for this type of thinking, system one, system two thinking, but also silos. So silos pop up in organizations. I know that this is not directly related to decision sprints, but it's probably something you've experienced. Do you have any tips for stopping silos from forming as much as possible? Is this a process that actually improves not only the decision making, but by constantly deploying this process, you almost improve the structure of the organization because it breaks down silos before they would even start if done properly? That's one of my passion here is to be honest with you Scott, because I think it's one of the most baffling things in companies is the, you know, not initiating with another part of the organization that has some relevant input. So the way I solve for that, and this is actually part of the first workflow in the decision spring is grouping people around a common challenge. So to look at, you know, a problem you're trying to solve in a company or a new idea and saying, what competencies do we need to gather around this specific idea, this specific problem that we're trying to solve? When you start with that, from the get go, you automatically melt away the silos because the opposite is, I think more common, which is, okay, who's point on this in the company? And it could be a person or some function and there's no problem with that. If they then say, well, we're going to do a much better job of problem solving if we get the right inputs around, you know, what this, you know, what the picture is and what competencies do we have in this organization that we can group around this common challenge. So to me, that's the mindset that we need to take. And then you stop thinking about, you know, structures and layers and other things like that. And you just start thinking about, you know, what is, for example, what it has all will call a two pizza team, you know, not huge, but enough to feed the team with two pizza pies, right? Yeah. There's five or six or seven or and that's it. How do you are? Yeah, but that's what you get, you know, and that's really wise, because, you know, it's not one or two parts of corners of a company, especially on a large company that can really solve a problem, you know, holistically, right? So thinking about like being hungry for input, how do we get the right inputs to really solve this problem? That will melt away silos. And another, another point on that, because inputs are very important, but the larger the even smaller organizations, but the larger the organization, you're going to have endless amounts of questions that can be put through this process. So how do you prioritize the, the urgent and important? It's definitely a matter of relevance. And so you're right where, I mean, interestingly, if you ask everybody, and I have a methodology in the book where I actually suggest people do this independently. So let's say you have this six-person team, and you want to get all the right questions. To me, that's getting to first base when you're trying to tackle a new idea. If you ask them to independently, you know, sit down, write up their questions, send them in to one person, you will find them a lot of common themes. So generally, you know, there's, you can group them together and do the pattern matching. And by trying to get independent input, you get to see like a little of the heat map of where is the headspace of the team? Where are really the questions that matter most? So I think what I would suggest is a little bit of that methodology where you kind of try and promote independent thinking so you can get wide enough divergent thinking. But then bring them together, you'll see, you'll see the patterns. And I think it'll be a manageable list. Interesting. So, so when you've, when you've run this exercise, even though you have so many different business units, so many different personalities, again, you start to see the common threads. And I'm assuming that would mean you'd actually start to see the common threads in the output as well. So when a question goes through this process, you start to see the common threads in the actual answers that you're getting. Is that good? Yeah. Well, it's the beauty of it, right? Is that because behind everybody's question is sort of some, consideration like a risk or fear or upside or, you know, is there a business case? And so if you, and the questions are very neutral because, you know, you're going to get people to, if you will, sort of agree that you've canvassed the problem right through the questions. And what happens is that people begin to sit, develop a lot of trust in the problem solving effort because they say, hmm, well, I'm good. If, if we do a good job, this, this set of questions, I'm pretty confident that we'll be drawing the right conclusions and therefore executing the right decision. So you do what I call upstream is you bring that all the way up there and it gets to be much less contentious where, where people, because it's neutral, right? There's no, there's no decisions yet. So I think that's a really important part of this methodology. You bring it to a neutral point, which questions to me are very much so in that realm. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.