Terrific MentorsJohn Bittleston, Eliza Quek & Denise Pang – Career, Business and Personal Mentors

Don’t Outsource Decisions

08 Aug 2008

Topics: decision making, outsourcing

I have a Mentee who, like many before him, has come to me because he is uncertain how to progress his career. He knows that my way of dealing with this, and other subjects, is to ask questions and help him come to his own conclusions. Of course, I will tell him if I think he is coming to the wrong conclusions but I won’t reach the conclusions for him. If I do they will be my solutions to his problem. He doesn’t want those, he wants his own solutions. When my Mentees have the right questions posed to them and are given the chance to test their ideas on their Mentor, they will nearly always come to the right conclusion.

Back in January I wrote about outsourcing, about the good and bad sides of handing over some of our work to others. Some of you have asked a very pertinent question – should we outsource thinking? After all, you might believe that my Mentee was doing just that.

We do outsource thinking anyway when we hand over our accounts to the auditors and ask for a view. We do so when we employ an advertising agency to create our image or promote our products and services. Market Research companies do an information-collecting job, but we ask them to draw conclusions from the results of their work. Clearly it is good to outsource some thinking.

The problem arises when we outsource the basic thinking and planning of our lives and businesses. There are many consultants waiting to tell you what to do with your business or how to conduct your life more successfully. Outsourcing such fundamentals to them is not a sensible spreading of the load, it is abdication of personal responsibility.

That is why the best consultants ask questions – relevant questions – but don’t provide cut and dried answers. It’s not, generally, because they don’t have a view; it’s because they want you to develop your own view. If you need help with thinking about a problem or opportunity you are sensible to seek it. Bouncing ideas off others is the best way to test them. Let them have the facts – plus your thinking – and see if they can sensibly critique your thoughts. But don’t ask them for a solution.

Look at it this way, when you start a new job you are given a job description. You know what your responsibility is. There is good reason to seek the help of those who are more experienced but the decisions you come to are yours, based on the best evidence you can muster. There are two major dangers in outsourcing thinking to the point where you abandon your own decision in favour of a consultant’s.

I am sure you would never do so as a way of escaping any blame that might arise if the decision turned out to be wrong. I am equally sure that you would never steal the consultant’s ideas and present them as your own; of course not. But there is a risk that you might be tempted to think this was a way of escaping your responsibility.

More dangerous, however, is the fact that the consultant is simply not you. He is not familiar with the style and culture of the business. If he is good he will try to absorb these things but he will never be as immersed in them as you are. So his answers will never be as good as yours.

But his questions may be a good deal better. That’s what you hire him for.