No-Brainer. Think about it.

During most of the time in my professional career, I used to work for US based companies, and that’s the reason I need to learn how to communicate in English. During that period, many phrases helped me to communicate better. Those phrases are common used for the English speaking people in business environments, and they are powerful because have a common accepted meaning that express ideas unambiguously regardless a poor pronunciation.

• “Cut your loses”, leave a bad business
• “From soup to nuts”, the whole process
• “Time kill deals!”, opportunities waits for no one

Among all these phrases, one particularly called my attention, and more specifically, the way in which executives used to say it in Spanglish: “Claro, es un “no-brainer!”. Don´t think about it! Forget about it! (as Donnie Brassco teach us to say). It’s a fact. No doubt about it. The right choice. Obvious! Every time this phrase is pronounced, could be interpreted at least from two perspectives: the right choice is crystal clear and would be a dumb thing to waste more time making the decision, and by the other hand, someone had a spark of genius and reveals a hidden truth to the eyes of others and benefits are clear enough that for sure must be the right choice. These two approaches could be seen contradictory, as a matter of fact reminds me a saying my father used to repeat “difference among smart and dumb is like walking in the middle of a gabled roof, you could slip and fall in one side or the other just in a single step”. What makes the difference among something brilliant or banal? From my point of view, difference relies on having the intention of understand and foresee, generally trough a deep and detailed analysis.

The discussion must consider some fine points. First, becoming a no-brainer, requires alternatives must be analyzed previously (consciously or unconsciously), making the way to an obvious decision. Second, we must verify if such alternatives exist for real. Third, gut feeling could be seen as an unconscious analysis done by the decision maker based on his own experience. In other words, the no-brainier today results of the brain-power of the past. This last idea was developed by Malcom Gladwel in his book “Blink”. “Good decsions come from experience, but experience comes from making bad decisions”, as Mark Twain used to say. Lessons learned must be developed form mistakes; documented failure will be helpful to make better decisions in the future.

Of course decision could be done without think about the alternatives, but we know this reduce our chances for take control on consequences. If we expose ourselves to decision making without previous analysis, an inadequate decision will be highly probable. We need evaluate if it’s really a lack of time or it is actually an excess on confidence, letting objectives out of sight.

Proposed paradigm considers constant analysis on the facts, in order the no-brainer became the top of a consistent understanding process. “Choose wisely”, as the Templar Knight said to Indiana Jones when the Holy Grail must be choose among a series of cups, “break wise” could be said.

All these ideas has been expressed from an individual standpoint, but they’re valid on groups of people and organizations. Analyze data as operational evidence within an institution identifying root causes on relevant events, generates knowledge to support decision making, allowing many of such decisions became real no-brainers. The idea isn’t avoid the people for thinking, but ask them do the thinking when time enough is available, looking forward to be ready, and recording that knowledge in the shape of proven cases, rules or analytic models to support better choices. As we mentioned before, this approach consist in think a lot in preparation for an event, and when the scenario came, we can ask “don’t think about it!” (In fact we are saying “don’t think in this moment, you think about it already!”). We could say agile decision making mechanisms wouldn’t be supported in banal and superficial thinking, but in constant preparation to generate and make knowledge available by all possible means, from expert judge on individual basis to analytic approaches synthetizing it form humongous data amounts generated as a result of the day by day operations in our organizations.

Meaning of no-brainer is very clear, unambiguous, but I consider important advocate to a constant thinking approach, reasoning and in general, change the no-brainer for the pre-brainer! Let’s finish with another wonderful phrase: “Great minds, think alike”. Breaking-Wise.