How to Make Confident Decisions with Mo Hamzian, CEO at VEL

Jenn DeWall:

Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. And in this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, I sat down with Mo Hamzian to talk about how to make confident decisions. Mo is a London Business School Sloan Fellow and the co-founder and CEO of VEL, a premium utopian tech-forward work cafe, an established leader with 20 years experience in nearly all things business. Mo excels at building businesses and creating value. He has successfully exited projects with a total value of over $150 million. And now I’m going to welcome you to join the conversation where Mo and I talk about how to make confident decisions.

Meet Mo Hamzian, CEO and Sloan Fellow

Jenn DeWall:

Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall, and I’m so excited to be sitting down with Mo Hamzian to talk about how to make confident decisions and to kick off. We’re gonna talk about Mo’s origin story, which is filled with confident decisions. How do you go from being, you know, an individual to owning an organization? So Mo, I wanna turn it over for you. We’ve just shared with our audience all the great things about who you are and what you do, but let’s hear from your mouth, tell us about yourself and how you came to be.

Mo Hamzian:

Yeah, thanks very much, Jenn. Lovely to be here. I, I listen to your show and, I’m a big fan of how you see the world and come of things. So, I’m glad to be here. You know, it’s interesting. I started, I graduated in the mid-1990s, and then I started working soon after, and you kind of watched the progression of terminology by itself and syntax and context of what entrepreneurship is about in the 1990s. What decision-making was about what the world context was about, you know, over the last sort of 30 years and how I’ve changed over time? It’s quite staggering, you know, you go through these kinds of seven-year cycles of shedding your skin and then renewing yourself with your new values, new systems. So I preface that because the current me <laugh>, in 2022 is far different to me 20 years ago.

And, all my aspirations are different. How I see the world is different. To some extent, my value systems are, have evolved. Maybe the core engine is still the same that, you know, what you expect and what you want from yourself and that level of drive or some things you look for in your rudder. But all in all, I think I’ve, you know, evolved into someone that really wants to solve problems. And that’s been a common denominator in my life. And sometimes, that is transient. And sometimes that’s more long-term, depending on what business you get involved with. So at the moment, I see that the hybrid workforce has changed a lot, and we are. I’m sure we’ll talk about it. We’re bringing a really cool product to market there.

But— walking backward— I moved to, to us in 2017. And let me tell you something, immigrating to countries is an imperfect decision, it’s very difficult. One to make and sometimes very tough to get. Right. But my family and I did it and, retrospectively, it was a good decision. And before that, I was pretty much in Europe, and I lived, my base was in London, and I traveled to different continents for work predominantly in real estate and F and B. but having come to the US, I’ve, I’ve noticed several differences between the US and maybe Europe and UK. And I would like to talk about some of those differences.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah. Let’s talk about it. Let, this is our learning opportunity. I want to hear them.

Mo Hamzian:

So let’s put it in binary and broad-brush generalization here, you know, and my kind of UK counterparts, my <inaudible> about this slightly, but, you know, the UK and Europe are much more what established in terms of mindset and much more conservative and far more risk-averse. And to some extent, much more liberal in their thinking. Not always, but certainly in commerce. So when it comes to decision-making, the starting position is often “no,” <laugh> until proven, right? Yeah. So if it was binary, it’d be zero, not a one until proven, right. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing in some respects- science, for instance, that’s a very good thing or medicine, that’s a very good thing, but in commerce, sometimes you need to make decisions slightly faster. In the US today, I think that it’s not just the population of the US that supports it as the single largest global market. It’s also the mindset, the attitude of the US. Think in the US today, again, generally speaking, of course, that the mindset is the other way around and everything is “Yes,” it is possible until proven no. So that little small detail in how you see the world can collectively make an enormous difference in your own personal manifesto, but also the countries.

What are the Barriers to Making Confident Decisions?

Jenn DeWall:

So essentially, it’s either you have to prove it to me, or I believe that it’s possible. You know, I don’t have to prove like something else needs to prove that it can work, or I can prove that it can work. Do you know? And I think that is a fundamental difference in terms of how even maybe leaders make decisions and how they might see themselves. I love that you called out that difference in maybe conservative approaches to decision-making because we’re talking about decision-making to our audience. Many people are struggling with how do you know whether or not you’re making the right decision? What information do you need to rely on? Or how do you make a decision when you don’t have enough information and even thinking? I love that where you’re going. What is your mindset around decision-making? Mo, what do you think are the barriers that people run into when they’re trying to make good decisions?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, often, decision-making, like many other things, is a muscle. Unfortunately, the education system doesn’t weave that into the ecosystem of the first 18 years of your life to actually teach you how to make decisions how to analyze. At what point do you stop analyzing, or at what point do you pull the trigger. What could outcomes look like? How do you change from outcomes? At what point do you, do you relinquish your decision and walk away from whatever you decided, but underlying all of that, I think human beings, you know, evolution has meant we have to have a certain amount of fear in us. You know, everyone wants to walk away from danger, and our ancestors and predecessors had some real dangers they had to get away from. So, because we are afraid, we are also afraid of making a bad decision and committing to it.

So that’s, to some extent, loosely speaking, in terms of carnal terms, fear gets in the way of, of good decision-making. Doubt and self-confidence make for bad decision-making, but, you know, being alone, which is one of the things by alone, I mean, either a very small team or not being open enough with people around you to involve them in that decision-making. And again, we can talk about that. And, and in, in small organizations, you see that a lot, whereby people are so much in the trenches, traveling at such high speed, that they don’t bring the Periscope up all the time to be able to make better decisions for six months, eight months, twelve months down the line. And they haven’t supported themselves with the right people around them to help them be accountable for some of those decisions.

Jenn DeWall:

I love that. So do you feel like a piece of that is someone’s confidence to ask for help to make decisions? Like, is that a piece of it because you talk about fear, it’s the fear of, you know, maybe we can avoid making the decision because we don’t wanna get it wrong. I think every listener can probably relate to that, that none of us want to make the wrong decision. Of course, we want to make the right one, but then what are we doing to help ourselves actually make that right choice? Then I feel like we do, we suffer in silence, and we don’t maybe rely on or reach out for and find additional people that could potentially help us solve our problem or make that decision.

Mo Hamzian:

I agree. And, you know, decision-making can become micro whereby, you know, you can go through a series of seven or eight gates, eventually, micro-gates to eventually arrive at the ending decision, whatever that is. You, you want to buy a new fridge for instance, right. I mean, and that’s maybe a smaller decision, although it has a high cost to it. But having good information is important, and good data is important, but to what extent do you rely on its accuracy? Now, if you’re going into, for instance, in my business, you go into a 10-year lease whereby we will talk about this again, how quickly can you get out of that decision? What switching costs can look like. You may want to frontload some of that decision-making with other people around you and rely on better data than if you would, for instance, make a softer decision.

So it depends on what kind of a decision you’re trying to make and what the consequences are, and to what. How much domain experience do you or do you not have? And having a lot of domain experience is amazing, but it also means the curse of the incumbent. You have a lot of blind spots. Because you may not have moved on with sign up the times, whether it’s because of technology or geo-market or whatever it is, then you think, you know, but in fact, you don’t. But because it is what you do, you think you know, and you don’t support yourself with the right kind of periphery mirrors if you see what I mean.

What is VEL?

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it just brings up the fact that we also think that we know more than what we do and we are. We sometimes rely on that bad data instead of actually taking the time to maybe research or get a counterpoint or ask someone else their perspective. Could you at a high level talk about, because I think this will be helpful for our audience to know the type of business that you run because you were, you know, for lack of a better way to describe it, you wear a lot of hats. You are an entrepreneur. You are a CEO. I mean, how did, can you tell a little bit to our audience about what you do. Because you’re making decisions that are going to impact the long-term success of your organization, whether that’s the, you know, the rent that you’re going to pay for lease, but then also determining what next, where do we go? So if you could just share a little bit about who you are in your organization.

Mo Hamzian:

Well, I’m very lucky to be leading a really fast-growing company. We are, you know, tongue in cheek. If I met you and all your audience in a very large elevator, and you know, you guys ask what we do. We say we’re bringing the love child of Starbucks and WeWork to market. We believe the hybrid workplace has changed how we work and how we commute and where we work. And we think the coffee shop is one of those go-to places where millions of people around the world spend billions of dollars going to coffee shops to do some work five to eight hours a week. And coffee shops, to some extent, complement your home and your office. But coffee shops just haven’t been reinvented fast enough to create that micro-transactional, really good experience. So we said, you know, if GoPro was making a coffee shop, is Google was making a coffee shop.

Mo Hamzian:

What would it look like? What would the Red Bull version of a coffee shop look like? This extreme environment is built up from the ground up, where it takes into account lots of different parameters. For instance, if you’re lefthanded, what does it mean for your experience, and what does hygiene mean and lighting mean and air quality and privacy and acoustics and psychological safety. What did those mean in a coffee shop setting, and why can’t everyone benefit from that? And not just the elite who work at these giant corporations, which, I’m in love with that kind of building. So kind of democratizing that slightly at a very kind of easy price point. You can walk into us, spend $10 and experience that for an hour. So we’ve grown leaps and bound. We started with me. I found my co-founder and COO terrific guy named Jack two months into a month and a half off into my campaign.

Mo Hamzian:

We’re now, you know,10 advisors, 65 investors building a large team, building multiple locations at the same time. And looking, looking at really mouthwatering outcomes for ourselves of having 50 or a hundred of these in the next couple of years, which, which means with that level of scale, walking away from what we do, but actually how we do it. Lots of decisions are being made. And some of those are short-term, but some of them have a major impact long term getting them right is important. But knowing how to walk away from the ones that are less good is also important.

What Framework Do You Use to Make Confident Decisions?

Jenn DeWall:

Wait, so how do you do that? Because you are, as an entrepreneur, you see opportunity, right? Isn’t that the mindset of an entrepreneur? How can we grow the business? How can we potentially scale? So question, how do you prioritize what to do first? Because I think that’s a decision that’s sometimes really difficult is, how do I prioritize what is important, especially when there are so many great solutions? How do you prioritize that? Or what do you do to help yourself make a more informed decision?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, we have a framework, and it’s not, I mean, we’ve adopted it. We haven’t come up with it. We have two frameworks actually that really help us one. We have something called the OKR, objective and key result, major companies around the world, kinda immaterial of, of which vertical they’re in, whether they’re established or newer companies- use that. This means whatever we are trying to do, there has to be an objective to do with it. And we have to be able to measure it at the end of it to have some sort of key result. We connect that to time and money, which means we then have monthly OKRs, which say this month, the team has to accomplish these goals associated with these goals are these key results. And the direct overview idea. And we spend four hours at the end of a month inventing what next month could look like. And we do it with quarter and fiscally at the same time.

So that is a real kind of true north for us from there. We know how to allocate resources of time and money and, and, time of people. And then, we identify gaps. So the first and foremost is which direction you’re running. I mean, jumping into the weeds to make decisions is, is much harder, but if you know which direction you’re trying to run, it’s much better to then build branches from there. So we start from the top and build down into the permit. The second framework we use is something called the RACI, which is this idea that says good decision-making has to have some functions in it. There has to be someone responsible in that decision-making process. It could be more than one person. There has to be someone accountable, and it can only be one person accountable. The buck has to stop with that person. She or he is ultimately responsible for that decision. Then there is someone

Jenn DeWall:

Can I ask you something quickly, Mo? Sorry to interrupt you. Because I think sometimes people can be reluctant to either feel like, well, who should I make that way? Or who should I give that responsibility to? How do you determine, because I know that you likely have a lot of things going, how do you empower that autonomy to say the buck stops with you? You are the person because there’s a level of confidence that you need that individual to have to be accountable. So how do you select that person? Or how do you go about determining that?

Mo Hamzian:

The person who’s ultimately responsible, which is slightly different -the nuances of responsible and accountable are slightly different. [The responsible person] is a domain expert. They may be a, you know, social media guru, and their responsibility is to deliver certain results, manage the campaign, et cetera. But then the CMO who sits above them may be accountable for that because the CMO she’s managing bigger dependencies. She’s managing TV campaigns, different rollouts, customer acquisition strategies. In comparison, the social media manager who is the R in that campaign is not entirely aware of all the other spinning plates. So there could be the same two people in the department, but they just have different information flowing functions. So I think their main expertise is, is really important in, in the R and the person who’s ultimately accountable is someone who’s a little bit more senior who has been more of a periphery vision into other departments that have an impact on it.

But then within that RACI, which gets even more interesting as someone who’s supporting a decision, someone who’s consulting on the decision and someone who’s being informed of the decision. For instance, if you have a CFO, she or he may be informed of the cost bearing of this decision, but it’s a one-way piece of traffic where they just need to hear the information, and you’re not expecting any traffic back from them to make a good decision. So, if your audience hasn’t come across, it’s helped us enormously to be able to scale really, really fast and not trip over ourselves bump into each other. Because in, when you’re trying to scale fast, the function becomes really, really important. And it’s within a function that decisions are made. And believe it or not, I fell off my seat when I came across this statistic, we– an average human being makes 14 million decisions a year- conscious decisions. So whether I should have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee is a conscious decision.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah.

Mo Hamzian:

So if you’re making 14 million decisions and let’s say you’re awake, you know, you’re at work for half of those decisions, you take about seven or eight million decisions at work every year. Even if each decision had a hundredth of a penny cost to it, you know, a bad decision can cost you and your organization a lot of money. So investing in good decision-making, and there’s definitely an algorithm and science to it is really important.

What Tools Help You Make Confident Decisions?

Jenn DeWall:

How do you invest in good decision-making?

Mo Hamzian:

Education training, creating an environment where people are psychologically safe, where you can make errors and volunteer that information. If you are in an environment where you are afraid to own up or admit or even call it wrong, you have some rigidity there that makes it difficult. Technology is incredible to be able to bring, to shine a light on it and bring some transparency into it. There are some algorithms out there on set plays at the same time, what you should do in certain situations. For instance, when you’re recruiting or when you’re making certain decisions that are repetitive. Should you interview 10 candidates, or should you stop at three? There are some statistics behind it that will help you determine that. And finally, it’s confirmation biases in your own heuristics to be able to make sure that you can get it out the way of a good decision. and sometimes that’s very hard to do,

Jenn DeWall:

Right? Absolutely. I am reading. And I said this, I think probably on a prior podcast, but I’m reading Adam Grant’s book that he wrote and released in 2021, Think Again. And I think, you know, it was very thought-provoking in the sense of how much confirmation bias do I actually have, because again, I actually think, because I’m aware of these terms, that I’m also aware of my bias, and then I’m actually less aware than I want to be. Right. Like, I wish that I could, but confirmation bias. I mean, we know like how do you overcome confirmation bias? Because I know I want to be right sometimes. So it feels good. Right? You get that little endorphin that says I made the right thing, or your ego is just wanting that validation. How do you overcome confirmation bias for yourself personally?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, it’s really tough because the idea of a bias is that it’s something of a blind spot inherently, which means it’s you can’t see it if it was. If you could see it, it wouldn’t be blind to you. Therefore having a good team is important. And by that, I mean a good organizational structure. You could have a good team, but just wrongly set up. So organizational structures become whether you’re flat, a hierarchy, or functional, whatever it is, I think that needs to be identified for you and your team. And our team is very small. So you can just be a couple of people, but still, you can have that structure in place. And an advisory board is incredible. Believe it or not, an advisory board initially, when you’re very small, very young- can be imaginary. It can come from books. You can read a biography of someone that you admire and what they’ve done in this life and get to know them and say, what would they tell me in that environment?

That is, to some extent, a measure of accountability, even there. But as you get more, you know, you get larger and maybe older, or you build a business around an organization having an advisory board. And we have, we have six advisors with whom we meet about 16 hours a month on all. And it’s our time to say, can you help us put our head around the corner? What are we not seeing here? Stress test our decisions. And are we making the right call? Are we too committed to this? That our nose is too close to it, that we don’t see, you know, the woods from the trees and those things are about intention. It’s about wanting not to do it, and hopefully, you won’t do it.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah. You’ve got that you bring just people to examine the problem. Did we pick the right solution? And you talked about a lot of key things within that, you know, actually having the accountability around the milestones, the check-in points, are we getting it right? Do we need to change or iterate? How do we miss the mark? I think that’s actually where a lot of people go wrong in that decision-making process is it’s more of that set and forget. They see the next big idea. They have, you know, assigned different people, probably not just one person to be accountable to it, but they’ve assigned multiple people. And then once it gets to the execution, they say, well, we implemented to check that box, onto the next, and then there’s no follow up on it. I’m curious. How like is that’s something that you do for yourself in advance? You’ll set this curriculum, or I guess, journey, if you will, that says, you know, we’re going to release and make this decision. When do you check in on it again? Or how do you build in those check-in points? Because I think that really is what people struggle with, or they just get so excited about the idea that they don’t think about the importance of that.

Mo Hamzian:

I agree. I agree. I come from a school of thought, that kind of very disciplined that says ideas are cheap and it’s about execution unless you’re able to deliver on it. It can be meaningless, actually. So, and we are also very lucky at VEL. We come from- we are remote-first, and we come from an environment that had to be remote-first, just pure necessity because we grew up and we innovated, and we became effective during COVID, which meant we had to be remote-first. With that comes— and I’ll come to question— but with that comes some responsibility of creating a digital environment whereby you’re still highly connected. These amazing companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, these people lived together for years on end, creating the product, creating these companies, creating culture, creating value.

It’s much harder to do that remotely when you’re not together initially. Therefore you have to overcompensate using technology. And we have done that through the adoption of Slack, Miro, Monday, Teamflow. The list goes on for us, and each one has a different offering for us. So when it comes to a decision-making value chain or a decision-making trail, we have, again, the RACI becomes involved, whomever they are within that decision-making chain. And we have touchpoints. And because we don’t have an office, we have tried to create data rooms. If you imagine a real physical room, a live data room, which says, if Mo wants to walk into this room at 2:00 AM, the information should be live, should be current so Mo can add value, extract what he needs, get on with what he has to do, and then the same for everyone else. So we can create this environment where I can work at 2:00 AM if I want to, and I can work remotely, but there is a certain responsibility from the team in that. It takes, I’m getting used to. But if you can, if you can, if you can get it right, it can help you move much faster.

Jenn DeWall:

On-demand data rooms that actually contain real-time information. Right? Think about how happy, I mean, if I think, and I was maybe a new employee, and I was maybe to some of the meetings, how nice would it be to have a centralized place where I could observe the problem, understand the problem, understand even how I fit with the problem? I think that’s such an interesting concept, and I’ve never heard of data rooms before, but I love that from where I sit in, the problems that I hear from leaders when we teach through Crestcom’s programs just what a great place to make sure that we’re keeping communication open!

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What Harms Our Ability to Make Good Decisions?

Jenn DeWall:

I wanna bring it back down to, you know, your kind of recommendations or how you start with making that confident decision. And I know that one of the first things that you said is thinking about what is the outcome that you want to get. And we also talked about the importance of either having strategic partners or getting a different point of view to make sure that we can overcome some of those barriers. But once we figure out what decision, how do we then make it? How do we then make the decision? Because I think that’s where the, even though we might know at a high level, that the change is needed, the decisions needed. I think then there are a few things that can really inhibit us from making the decision. Yeah. I mean, we talked about fear earlier, but one might be, and this is what we had talked about earlier. What does it mean to be 70% okay with the decision and not know the other 30%, or do you have any tips on how you say I have limited data? How do I make this decision?

Mo Hamzian:

I love that point. So, so intelligent of you to bring it up. I think you can make quick decisions or long kinds of longer extracted decisions. But if you need access to information, I think it’s about assimilating information really, really fast. It means understanding what it means, being coherent with it. Even if there are gaps there, knowing that there are gaps, that’s good enough. Then, being in an evaluation phase. And we talked about this– decision-making has a large amount of fatigue with it, which can reduce willpower and can create an amount of stress, whether it’s for the individual or for the team. So it’s much easier to kind of sit in a holding pattern of evaluation, which means a non-attachment to the outcome. I’m purely evaluating the information at hand, and we haven’t discharged a decision. We could go either A, B or C.

Mo Hamzian:

We’re not quite sure yet. And actually protecting that space, even if it’s for 15 minutes, then once you’ve done that, the decision-makers at that point may not be the people who’ve been assimilating, the information, the decision-makers at that point, can’t in a short, sharp, effective way, actually make that decision. And it’s okay to make a decision on 70%, 80% sometimes actually more often than not, particularly in startup territory, and it is okay to make that. So as long as, you know, the switching costs the consequences and what it means to get out of it or change the route. But sometimes, knowing the error is, is also important. Once you’ve calculated the risk and the downside, you may be able to get much more comfortable with it. Talking about decision fatigue. I think that’s real. It does, it’s counterintuitive to think about it, but the more time you spend contemplating decisions, it does get harder to make it. Sugar levels drop, willpower drops, ability to resist temptations to confirmation biases drops. I mean, some of these are a marketer’s dream, you know, of getting us to buy something, but they’re also real within a team. What time of day you make the decision is important. Are you, you know, really simple stuff, are you hungry? Are you tired? Are you not? Sometimes these can’t be avoided. Of course. But the last thing you wanna do is to be in an eight-hour decision-making session. That does not exist. It’s not good for business.

Jenn DeWall:

Well, and I like that you bring up the important piece because again, we often think about it, and you probably have, we’ll have a much more high-level way to describe it, but we often, I think, just make decisions and are just like indifferent to them. We don’t think about what’s going on. We don’t think about what’s going to happen. We don’t think about it, is it the right decision? Is it not? So Mo many of us have been conditioned to look at like strategy decision-making through this lens of what’s best for the company. What do we need to consider? What’s the data that we have. And I do think, and it’s what you just called out a misstep that we, we don’t even realize that we’ll play into whether or not we make a great decision is our, is how we’re feeling physically.

It is. Are we hungry? It is. Are we tired? I mean, we talk about that at a high level. I think many people know your health determines it, but right here, you just explained why your health is so important as it relates to overcoming decision or initiative fatigue, like being able to make sure that you are set up for success. You have enough sleep to be able to look at a problem objectively, or with a fresh set of eyes, you have eaten. So you don’t have any other annoying, maybe pings that could detract from your ability to focus. I just think that’s a really important point that you just made that not a lot of people even consider. It might just be, oh, I don’t have the information or, oh, they’re doing too much. And you don’t realize, but are you showing up as your best self right now? I just like that you bring that point up because I don’t think people often think about that innately as it relates to decision-making.

Mo Hamzian:

No, I agree. And you know, I think decision-making is much more of a sprint than it is a long-distance run. You know, if you, if you know what I mean, I think if you want to, if you, if you want to evaluate something, you can go on for days and weeks in, even months evaluating various scenarios and planning for it and knowing what risks are associated within outcomes, what gaps are there managing and allocating resources to it. But ultimately, it has to be sharp and effective. And basing that- and there are case studies out there that I think there is one with, with sort of Israeli judges that measured the consistency of the decision-making on verdicts before and after lunch. And they found why there were inconsistencies. They were making different decisions because of their sugar levels. So it is real of your physiological self; psychological self will have an effect on what kind of a decision you make.

How do We Evaluate our Decisions?

Jenn DeWall:

Wow. I actually need to go and find and do more research on that because that is incredibly interesting to know that their accuracy of decision-making could have been impacted by the time of day that they made that decision. And by the physiological, I guess, feeling that they had or their physical feeling that they had at the moment. I mean, this is why this is important to everyone. I know that evaluation is a piece. How do you evaluate whether or not you hit the mark? Are there any tips that you think of what you look for to determine are getting it right?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, evaluation pre before the fact and after the fact is slightly different. After the fact you have data, you can measure it, and you ought to measure it. Otherwise, it’s not really a key result. and it shouldn’t be soft, intangible ideas of measuring. It should be clear and effective because if you’ve set good goals for the outcome, then you should be able to measure them. But you also have to have enough time have gone by, and I know I’m being abstract because the situations are so different. Sure. But the principles are the same. You have to have enough time have to have gone by for you to know the decision yielded results or not. Right? Let’s say you’ve gone into a lease. You’ve opened your doors, and you’re three months in, and you’re not hitting your marks on revenue yield, et cetera.

Then you know, you, you can’t make a U-turn. It’s far too early. So giving enough time to go by in that scenario is important. But coming back to this idea of decision-making within an organization, whether how you measure it or how you evaluate it, I think this degree of culture. Then you need to bring in what do you stand for and what kind of environment do you want to create as micro teams, larger organizations about decision-making. How important is it to be right? How it is important to be not always right but be good at making decisions fast at making decisions. How fast do you want to travel? Some industries can’t afford mistakes. They move very slowly. And rightly so. But in some businesses, it’s much more important to move fast and be ahead of the competition. Hence this culture and philosophy of minimal viable product, minimal viable X. So, there are minimal viable decisions that you can make that will get you from one gate to the next gate. And then let’s see where we get up, and each gate and these are metaphoric ideas. Each gate can have this association of how much money do I need to put in? How much manpower do I need to now put in? Because it’s been validated. Now we need to get to the next process.

Jenn DeWall:

I love that you’re talking about it. Even from that financial piece, what do we need to do with objectives? I think sometimes that decision there might be a high-level decision that’s made at the executive level. And then it trickles down through the organization through, you know, smaller decision-making. But then people are still, you know, a little confused, what do I do? How do I do it? And I think that you just answered, you know, just the importance of why you need to plan at every single level. You need to see the problem see how it relates to it. Do you have capacity? And I think sometimes people might hear the objective coming from up top, and then they look at their teams, and then they may not have the capacity, but then they still might make the decision to go forward. And is it really going to be successful? Or how much time as you talked about thinking about time, we need time. How much time will you allow, given the resource constraints that you have to determine to make it right?

I think a lot of people at the emerging leadership level, the mid-level leader, may not be exposed to using this type of data to make the decision. It still might be well. This is what, you know, the strategic initiative is. So let’s just go forth and implement, instead of really then thinking about it as another opportunity to strategize and make a great decision for the execution. I’m not sure if you see that where people feel, and maybe it comes back to our earlier conversation about the importance of having responsibility and accountability because if it’s not there, then that might be one of the primary reasons. We’re not even doing the diligence to think about how we can impact the success of this decision by planning.

Mo Hamzian:

I agree. There definitely should be a decision culture, domain fit for a good decision to come. I like some of the points you mentioned and raise this idea or this argument of how much of the decision can be delegated. I mean, look, look what automation robotics algorithms are doing in lots of industries. How much, how much decision, how many fewer decisions does a pilot have to make or a driver has to make today than 25 years ago? I think slowly we are gonna see that level of disruption in the boardroom. Whereby you can make fast, reliable, good decisions, even data visualization and business intelligence software that previously were reserved for conglomerates today. The startup can get it. There is an aggregation of data whereby you can say, I, I have the data, and it’s only pointing this way. And that level of transparency or visualization of being able to slice and dice is only going to get better. It might even get so good that it can suggest or recommend a decision for you, which means we can really focus on creativity, larger decisions, which are really, really complex, and the way we work might change!

Overcoming the Fear of Making the Wrong Decision

Jenn DeWall:

So let’s close the worst possible outcome that people think about when, or as it relates to decision-making. Well, Mo, what happens if I make a mistake? What happens if I get it wrong? What advice do you have for people as it relates to learning from your mistakes? Because I think we go into it. We’re afraid we don’t wanna make a mistake. And then, when it happens, it can feed into that narrative. Look, you did it, you did it wrong and then make us more risk-averse in the future. So how do you help people learn from their mistakes?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, I’m no different, actually. I’m no different. It’s, it’s a human condition. Micro success is important. Therefore going through these gates and validating it in smaller chunks becomes easier because then you can follow the maps of how you got there. And it doesn’t shatter your confidence because you could have done six things, right? But the final thing is just not, and, and you, you’re mitigating risk somehow because you might have never ended up at the end if you’ve broken down the process a little bit more.

Jenn DeWall:

But micro successes, I love that reframing it. This is a micro success. We now have new data that says whether we’re getting it right or whether we’re getting it wrong, and that can build that confidence. It’s a reframe. I love that.

Mo Hamzian:

And, and getting, getting comfortable with errors is just one of the things that everyone needs to get better at as an organization. Whether, whether you call it a failure, we call it errors rather than a failure because everyone makes errors. Even if you made an error, you might not have failed. So culturally, we try to say it’s okay to do that, But ultimately there are consequences when you get it wrong, and sometimes you just have to be okay with those consequences. But if you move together as a team and you’re not solo in an ivory tower, everyone is caught off guard by surprise. And you discuss it, you get it wrong, and often you’re getting it wrong together. <laugh> So you don’t wanna be alone in it. That level of camaraderie is really unifying, and often, often teams come out. They may have got it wrong systematically for months at a time, but because they persevere, they’re a very good team. They’re putting everything in place correctly. They’ll eventually succeed and get it right and solve the problem.

Where to Find Mo Hamzian

Jenn DeWall:

I love that. So there’s a level of vulnerability and acceptance. I like your reframe calling it in error, and this is going to happen. But then also another piece that I heard you say is then we were it to the team, and we have dialogue. And then we, it allows us to examine, Hey, what part did we maybe, I guess mis-think or not mis-think that’s not a phrase, but did we not think about correctly? And what are we going to do to course-correct? How can we continue to grow together? I love that. Maybe it’s because I’m obsessed with building connections and belonging. But when I know that people feel a sense of belonging and support, we work together better. Even if we are making errors or mistakes or failures. And, you know, again, you brought up another point of the important piece of the planning process with every single decision. What are the possible or potential consequences that can happen? And are you okay with them? Or can you weather that, if that occurs? Mo, I have loved our conversation today. I think you hit on so many great points. You are so highly intelligent and just brought a lot of different perspectives on how we can approach them and how we can be more resilient and more confident decision-makers, Mo, how do people get in touch with you? How can they connect and get to know more about VEL?

Mo Hamzian:

Well, I really enjoy connecting with people on LinkedIn, so I’m sure it’ll be your show notes. Please find me there. Vel, you can find us at myvel.com. And we are all social media channels, and our handle is @workatvel. I’m sure you put in the show notes. I enjoy meeting new people discussing new problems. So feel free to find me.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah, if you’ve got a decision that you’re making, maybe they can reach out and connect with you and see What Mo would do! Mo, thank you so much for giving us or giving us your time, which we know is an important resource, but your expertise your passion to helping people. I greatly appreciate it. I look forward to the day that Vel comes to Denver too. So one day, it’s gonna come to Denver. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. It was great to have you on the show.

Mo Hamzian:

Thanks, Jenn. Well done.

Jenn DeWall:

Thank you so much for joining us on this week’s episode, The Leadership Habit podcast with Mo Hamzian. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, or better yet, if you know someone that could benefit from this conversation about how to make confident decisions, share this episode with them; if you want to connect with Mo, feel free to head on over to MyVel.com. You can find the link in our show notes. Also, connect with them on LinkedIn and feel free to reach out, to ask him for his insight on how to approach your challenges. And, of course, if you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service.