The Catalyst is a Group 18 publication. I'm Kevin Noble. I run a business transformation consultancy and write practical frameworks for leaders who want more from themselves and their teams. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at https://catalyst.group18.co/.
I’m back! I recently returned from a three week vacation with my family in Italy. I took a break from publishing, so you haven’t heard from me for a while.
Because of inertia and jet lag I definitely worked for a few hours each morning for several days into the trip. I’d wake up early, work, then get the family up to go play around Rome. I’d been working on a large proposal, so I was trying to get that across the line, plus work on other tasks I’d set for myself. I had drawn up a whole “Italy Working Plan” in Obsidian on the plane, so tried to crank through that.
Thankfully, by the time we changed cities, the proposal was less urgent, there was less jet lag, and I was able to transition into being more present with the family, and continue that for the rest of the trip. The team did a great job holding down the fort in my absence, which I’m very appreciative of. I was able to build a lot of travel memories with the family.
The good news is that July was our highest revenue month of the year. August will be lower unless some outstanding proposals hit. Sales is still a big priority for me, but as I’m the primary person working on that, it slows down when I’m on vacation. I'm back and starting to build momentum back up.
On the AI front, I’ve had a few interesting experiments:
1 - Project Knowledge Base Coming home from a three week vacation, I wanted to catch up at work. I could ask everyone for an update, but a) that pulls them off billable work, and b) humans are subject to biases and general forgetfulness that may not get me a complete picture. This seems like the sort of thing AI is tailor made for, so I started to experiment. I had Claude go through Granola meeting notes from the team, Slack, Confluence, and ClickUp to build a knowledge base in Obsidian. It did a stellar job. I could ask the knowledge base questions about what’s going on, and it even surfaced inconsistencies and gaps in the work. This was a one-off project, so it’s not systematized. In the future I’d want to run it on a schedule to continue enriching it as meetings and new content is created, but that will be non-trivial to solve. I’d also want to include more source systems, then expand it across all projects.
2 - Sales Playbook I’m still determined to get good at sales! After the success I had with the above project, I wondered what AI could find from all of my various sales calls. What works and what doesn’t? What am I doing well, and where do I have mis-steps? Also, with Anna now being full time, she’ll be participating more in sales, and I wanted to get things out of my head and onto paper. So I had AI pull my sales calls and build a playbook. It had good insights, like a pattern of “recording a disqualifier in an internal debrief and pursuing the deal anyway.”
3 - Automatic Calendar-to-Meeting-to-Obsidian-to-ClickUp My meetings and action items are now mostly on auto-pilot. My calendar drives the creation of daily- and meeting-specific notes in Obsidian. After a call, the system pulls the meeting summary and action items from Granola into each meeting’s Obsidian note, and lists that meeting in my Meeting Inbox for manual review. I review call tags, attendees, and action items - make adjustments - then check the box for that meeting to confirm I'm done. After confirmation the meeting note gets all of its review scaffolding removed, and action items are pulled into ClickUp in the right project (based on the meeting project tag). Action items not associated with a project are put into a Meeting Inbox in ClickUp for processing. I use Ollama for all the LLM work, so it’s private and local and free.
"What keeps you up at night?” General James Mattis was once asked by a television reporter. Before the question was quite finished, he was already answering. “I keep people awake at night.”
— Ryan Holiday in "Courage is Calling"
Deep Dive on Decision-Making Methods
One of the things traveling is good for is making you recognize invisible ingrained patterns. When you see other people’s default pattern (e.g. looooong dinners in Italy, lots of coffee, driving 12” from the car in front of you) it makes you wonder about your own default.
From there you can either: a) keep your existing default b) replace your default with theirs c) incorporate both into your toolbox as options
For example, going forward I’ll keep my weeknight meals short, but on occasion my weekend meals might be multi-hour affairs. On the other hand, I’ll continue driving a safe distance from cars in front of me; you know…physics.
This spectrum-of-patterns awareness has also been on my mind because of how people make decisions. It’s so fascinating to pay attention to how different people make decisions in different circumstances.
I had a CEO who sat on a proposal for six weeks. He didn't talk to me directly; he would route feedback through a third party who would relay it to me. I'd revise, send it back to the CEO, and the cycle continued. Meanwhile, the org. suffered from the core problem the proposal was designed to alleviate.
I also talked with a senior person a few weeks into a new role. Their boss gave them clear parameters and decision authority; here’s the budget, here’s the goal, go build it. And yet, this person sat on the decision and eventually wanted to send a proposal back up to the boss for approval 😬 At one point they even asked me whether to send information to their boss via Slack or email!
Different people, different levels in the org chart, and my reaction to both was the same: just decide!
That said, “just decide” is my own default pattern. I like making decisions. I hate open loops. But just because it's my bias doesn't mean it's always the right call.
You don’t experience your own method as a method
For most of us, we don’t sit down and pick an approach. We just act. Whatever we do feels like being reasonable and rational and normal. Other people are the weird ones.
We sit in our cocoon, safe in our default methodology, periodically getting annoyed at others for violating it - not realizing that it wasn't an intentional methodology chosen for utmost effectiveness in this particular circumstance. We're just running our default pattern autonomically.
You can only begin to see your own approach by getting exposure to somebody else’s.
My default became more obvious as I spent six weeks watching a very different method get run in front of me. The contrast is what highlights it.
Where are you irritated (or impressed) by someone else right now? That’s the contrast that holds a clue to improving your effectiveness. You might as well take advantage of it!
Cocooned in a tent fort of decision making comfort - not like those weirdos out there.
Neither of them is using a bad method, per se
Methods are matched to circumstances, and neither of the methods I shared earlier are bad in and of themselves. They’re bad when they’re used in the wrong circumstance.
In the first, waiting for more certainty is a great approach on a decision you can’t undo. Jeff Bezos calls these one-way doors, and I’ve written about hats, haircuts, and tattoos. In a one-way door, if you don’t like what’s on the other side, too bad - you can’t go back! So go slow. Consult widely. Sleep on it.
In the second, kicking a decision up for approval is also a great approach when you’re genuinely outside your authority or your boss is holding context you don’t have.
Both of those methods are right somewhere. The trouble is when it’s the only method either person has in their library, so it gets applied to everything. An easily reversible business agreement gets treated as a one-way-door. A decision that was explicitly delegated, with guardrails already drawn, gets escalated back to the delegator.
Any time the method is mis-matched to the circumstance, the result is suboptimal. It costs extra time or extra money, or you make the wrong decision, or your indecision lets problems linger.
The goal is to become conscious of the matching, and to build a library of methods you can pull out depending on the circumstance.
If you pay attention, you might discover your decision methods are like smashing veggies with a hammer - there are better methods out there.
On collecting methods
When there's friction in a decision I'm part of, I’m trying to do two productive things instead of just getting annoyed.
Describe the method, not the judgment. Saying “he’s slow” is a judgment and it teaches me nothing. “He’s treating a reversible decision like a one-way door, and he’s never said what would change his mind” is a method, and that enables me to catch myself doing it and adjust.
Ask what it’s good for. Every approach is right somewhere, so I need to explore where that somewhere is. In what circumstance would this particular method - no matter how ineffective it might seem to me - work well?
Notice what this is doing. In the first, I'm building a library of methods. In the second, I'm assigning them to circumstances where they’re effective. These become playbooks I can use in the future.
The payoff from doing this is you end up with moves you’d never have come up with on your own. Peter Drucker tells a story about Alfred Sloan at General Motors, looking around a table where everybody agreed with him, and then postponing the decision to the next meeting so the group had time to develop some disagreement. That's an interesting decision method I may not have come up with on my own. You only get that by paying attention to when another person decides (or reading about it 😀)...
…and being humble enough to incorporate these learnings into your own playbooks.
Call to Action
Where is someone annoying or inspiring you with their decision making?
Write one sentence describing their method instead of your judgment.
Not “she’s indecisive,” but something like “she keeps gathering input and hasn’t said what would end the gathering.” Then ask yourself the follow-up: what kind of decision would that be exactly the right approach for?
What’s your default? Reply and tell me - I want to add it to my library 😀 kevin@catalyst.group18.co
Kevin
If this kind of thinking is useful, it's what I do professionally. Group 18 works with business owners and leaders of growing companies on the operational and leadership challenges that limit performance. If that's relevant to what you're working on, I'd like to hear about it.
