Welcome to SALES with ASLAN, a weekly podcast hosted by ASLAN Co-founders Tom Stanfill and Tab Norris, geared at helping sales professionals and sales leaders eliminate the hard sell. At the end of the day, we believe that selling is serving. ASLAN helps sellers make the shift from a ‘typical’ sales approach, to one that makes us more influential because we embrace the truth that the customer’s receptivity is more important than your value prop or message.

The goal of these interviews is to spotlight various experts in the world of sales and sales leadership – sharing informational stories, techniques, and expert interviews on the sales topics you care about.

The following are notes from EP. 198 Your Decisions Will Determine Your Destination

On this episode Tom talks with decision expert, Jon Bircher, as he shares insights from him life's work at Salt and Light Coaching. This episode dives into the power of your decisions and how they shape not just your future, but who you are.

Here's what you'll get:

• Uncover Your Decision-Making Style: Are you a gut feeling person or a data-driven analyzer?
• From Selling to Helping: Learn how sellers can create a competitive advantage by shifting their focus from closing deals to helping customers make the best decisions.
• The Four Key Questions: We'll unveil a powerful decision-making process that empowers you to "Decide How You Decide".

Listen below:

Or read below:

00:15
Tom Stanfill
Jon Bircher, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited. I was actually really looking forward to, I think, selfishly learning about your service and consulting practice and training. And you can explain more about that in a minute. But you may not know this, but I bumped into you through a mutual connection and was first intrigued by your company name, Salt and Light. Yeah, I think comes from the New Testament. Right? I act like I don't know, but I do know it comes from the New Testament. And your experience, you've run a, been CEO of a large, fast growing, I guess, global consulting business. And also you the consulting. Again, I don't know if it's training. You'll explain more about whether it's training or consulting, but around making decisions, which I'm seeing this topic come up a lot about how do we make better decisions?

01:03
Tom Stanfill
And I said, I got to get to know this guy. We reached out, we connected, and I became even more intrigued. So thanks for joining us. Thanks for being on the podcast.

01:13
Jon Bircher
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Tom. I'm really excited.

01:15
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, yeah. So tell me about it. Tell me about sort of your journey. You know, what is salt and light leadership and coaching and what's kind of your journey to starting this firm and give our listeners a little bit of context. Yeah.

01:32
Jon Bircher
Thank you. Thank you very much. I guess there's a couple of levels to this. One is like, why did I call it salt and light in the first place? Which I think you're, there was a.

01:41
Tom Stanfill
Lot of levels to my question, which you're digging into.

01:46
Jon Bircher
And just maybe a little bit about the background because it maybe highlights why focusing on leadership and coaching and why in particular around decision making and making better decisions. So most of my career, almost for the last 30 years, has been in and around the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector. So I started my life in commercial roles within the pharma sector and then moved into consultancy. And I grew, and I grew up, I guess, in consulting and working with organizations all over the world and executives all over the world in the pharma and healthcare space. And there came an opportunity right bang in the center of COVID where the company I was leading or part of the leadership team for was acquired. And that gave me an opportunity to consider what do I do next? A really big life decision.

02:38
Jon Bircher
And that's where salt and light coaching came from. I had the ability to be, or had the opportunity, I should say, to take some time to think about what it was I wanted to do next. And I honestly, when I left my previous company. I had no idea what that was. But I think you and I both share a common faith and a common belief, and I know many of the listeners will the same, and maybe some others don't. But for me, part of that journey was, I guess, quite spiritual. It was really tapping into where do I go next? And where am I feeling God is calling me to next in my work. And I think through all my career, this sort of statement or metaphor that Jesus used early on about being salt and being light really resonated for me.

03:25
Jon Bircher
It just felt like a really good shorthand for being a great colleague and a great leader and a great person in a workplace. And so I very quickly got asked to do some work for a client, and I suddenly needed a company name. I needed a. An id number and a VAT number and all of these different things, and I didn't really have a company name. I hadn't fully thought through what I was going to be doing, and I called it salt and light, and that's where it came from. But over time, I guess I've realized that salt and light are fantastic metaphors for the work we're doing, both in terms of helping leaders. Right. And also being good coaches.

04:06
Jon Bircher
And whether you think about salt as a, you know, what we do to add to food and being great flavor and enhancing the flavors of others or cultures, of organizations, or whether we think about it in its kind of preserving quality, you know, healing and restoring where maybe toxicity has been before, or if we think about light, you know, our job as. Our job as leaders is to shine a light, to spotlight and call out the genius of others. So I feel like there are some fantastic. Even if you are not a. A Christian or a believer in the Bible, there is some fantastic metaphor there that you can access in terms of what makes a great leader and a great coach.

04:45
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. Regardless of your faith, you believe in preserving and enhancing and light. I think of light as truth. Yeah. Right. What's the truth? And we talk about it at Aslan, our purpose is to bring truth to the marketplace. And that's what I love about. I'm sure it's true with the principles that you teach, when you teach, when you unpack a principle. In all of my years of leading workshops or speaking, when I unpack a principal, I've never had anybody go, raise their hand and go, that's not true. When you talk about the principles that drive human relationships and influence and leadership, everybody knows it's true because they've all experienced it. So I love the name. And it is. It was the first thing that attracted me. I'm like, I love that. And I love, you know, what I also like about what you're saying.

05:39
Tom Stanfill
And the name is, I feel like people are becoming more bold about their purpose. I don't know if that comes from a sense of we're just tired of just doing things because we're trying to make money. I don't know if there's a. People are more motivated for purpose now. I know purposes. I think if you look at the books that are sold, the highest selling books are related to purpose. So I don't know if people are looking for meaning as we all. I mean, we're wired for that. We're wired for purpose. So I think people are being more vocal and bold. And I think from our perspective or my perspective personally, I've become more passionate about talking to people who share that philosophy and passionate. So talk about the main service or solution that you offer at Salt Lake.

06:31
Tom Stanfill
That's obviously you're working with leadership teams.

06:33
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess the core of it all is working with leaders and leadership teams. And there are a whole range of things that we might be doing with those leaders and leadership teams, depending on everything from what you've just said about helping them define purpose or where next in life or how to deal with a tricky situation within their organization. But I think more and more where, and this is, I guess if you were to look in on what we're saying about ourselves in the company, more and more of our time is spent on helping people make better decisions, leaders and leadership teams. And I say that particularly because I think the challenge as an individual making a decision is very different than the challenge of trying to make decisions together and collectively as teams.

07:19
Jon Bircher
But I think I was thinking about what you're saying about truth and about purpose. And in a way, my own journey in all of this is I've gone from being the leader of a strategy consultancy and working with companies on strategy, which ultimately is decisions. It's the choices we're going to make about the priorities we're going to focus on in order to head towards a particular destination. So it's kind of like purpose in an organization and the strategy to get to that purpose.

07:47
Jon Bircher
But it feels like the journey I've almost ended up on is one which is a blend of both strategy and soul, you know, as the element of, you know, the good, strategic, business minded leadership decisions, but wrapping that all together with things of soul and character and, yeah, moral compass and our values, because all of that has to come together in decision making. And that is quite profound. And it's such a privilege to walk alongside leaders as they kind of grapple with that stuff.

08:17
Tom Stanfill
It's such a great point. I was, when I unpack our solution, I organize it around a pyramid, which is probably overused, but the foundation of the pyramid is mindset. What is your belief about your role? And what's your belief about how to be successful in that role? And that drives everything. And that's kind of what you're saying. I mean, drives your process. It drives how you communicate, how you sell, how you influence, how you lead. It all comes from these beliefs, these core beliefs that we have. Like you said, our strategy, if you look at your go to market strategy, purely to make money, obviously profits are required. But if it's purely to make money and there's nothing else related to that, then that's your belief that, and that's going to drive your strategy.

09:10
Tom Stanfill
So how does it, how do you kind of staying on that topic for a second when everybody's, especially publicly traded organizations, but I mean, everybody has to hit some sort of number or have to meet an objective, how do they come up with their purpose or meaning related to their strategy? Where, because I'd imagine a lot of people struggle with, like, look, I got my life purpose or I got the things that I really care about and I got business. How do you, how can you combine those two seemingly contradictory objectives?

09:47
Jon Bircher
That's a massive question. I don't know.

09:49
Tom Stanfill
That is a math.

09:50
Jon Bircher
Where am I supposed to start with that? I think it depends. Right? That's a really good consulting answer, isn't it? I think, I think it depends because it depends on like, if you're an entrepreneurial leader and like, let's say, like in your situation where you are, you know, you're the leader of a company, you've kind of conceived that company. Your values and the company values are kind of intertwined. They can't not be. And you've recruited the people and nurtured the culture. You know, that's a very different scenario than if you're working in a bigger.

10:18
Tom Stanfill
For me, it's easier for me.

10:21
Jon Bircher
Yeah, or harder, depending on your value set and your character and your strategy.

10:25
Tom Stanfill
Well, I mean, I can control it.

10:26
Jon Bircher
No, you have control over it.

10:28
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, I have over control, maybe my question, and I think that was too broad of a question, John, is if I'm in an admin organization, right? I'm in this organization and I got a team of ten or I got a team of 50, but I'm part of this big organization. Because you worked in the farmer world, right? We work a lot in the farmer world and I run a territory and I want to, you know, I'm held to this number. Sure. It can't, that's, I guess, really where I'm trying to help people think through. How do I, how does my sort of philosophy and values drive and purpose drive? Can those two live together?

11:09
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I think they can. I think if I brought it back to sort of decision making just for a moment, because decision making in many ways is our sort of daily life strategy playing out. You know, I think if we think about leadership, actually, people experience our leadership one decision at a time. Every decision we make causes some kind of ripple, and that ripple will have an effect both in the immediate term and the longer term. So I would almost say, how can we not think about this stuff like, as soon as you make visible the fact that our life is made up of the sum of our decisions?

11:50
Jon Bircher
If that's real, if that's true, and many authors would say it is, then how could we not integrate our own beliefs and feelings and emotions and our own experiences and purpose into the decisions we make in our leadership, in our daily lives? So it's almost like, I don't know how you could not do it. The challenge is how do you integrate that? And I think if you've got a situation where your company culture and your own personal beliefs are at odds, that's a very different and difficult situation. And there's some tough decisions, perhaps, and questions to be asked in that situation. But if they're broadly aligned and you have autonomy to lead your part of the company or part of the business, then I think it's really important that you are still leaning into your purpose and your own view of what is success.

12:44
Tom Stanfill
So it sounds like you're saying that whether you've made the decisions, well, maybe I don't want to use that word. Whether you've landed on your values and beliefs and purpose or not, it's going to be revealed by the decisions that you make. In other words, you have a set of beliefs.

13:01
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

13:02
Tom Stanfill
Right. You have a. And it reveal the decisions, reveal who I am.

13:06
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

13:07
Tom Stanfill
And if I don't stop it and analyze what's my purpose, what are my values? Yeah, I'm. They're going to drive my decisions either way. And I may not, like, where they're. Where they're leading because I haven't analyzed or is that. Is that the biggest struggle we make in making good decisions? Yeah.

13:26
Jon Bircher
I mean, I love that idea about, like, our decisions, like, reveal our values. I think they don't always necessarily reveal our values, but they certainly reveal what's important to us. And it's a little bit like coaches will often say, if people are struggling to find their values, figure out where you get annoyed or where they feel trampled on, and you'll soon realize, perhaps what's close to your heart that really matters to you. But I think everybody can. Everybody can benefit from just trying to get an idea about why you're on this planet, what you're here. Who are you here to be? What does the best version of you look like? I mean, why wouldn't you want to think about that stuff?

14:05
Jon Bircher
Because if our ultimate who we become is based on all the decisions that we make, well, we can either just keep making decisions, cross our fingers and hope for the best, or we can be intentional about it.

14:18
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, because you're headed in a direction, regardless of whether you want to look at it or not, your decision leading in a direction. I was. I was teaching a workshop recently, and were talking about purpose, and I asked the question. I said, why does. What does it matter? Because you're talking about, like, what all these decisions are leading me to a destination, and it's like. And which reveals our. Ultimately our purpose, whether stated or unstated. And we started unpacking. This is because I think were wired to live for purpose. So when we're not living with purpose, in other words, we're definitely. We're deciding, what is it most important? What am I here for? I'm going to be miserable because I was created to do that. It's like, I can't explain it any other way. We were put on this planet to do something.

15:09
Tom Stanfill
We have an assignment, and when we don't live it with that assignment, we're miserable. I mean, yes, we want. I mean, anytime the research has already been complete, it, like, anytime somebody accomplishes the thing, we all think, okay, that's the cool thing. They got all the money, the fame, whatever, and then you look at their lives. That's what you have the opportunity to do. Now it seems like there's every day a new documentary about somebody that's successful.

15:36
Jon Bircher
Yeah. And maybe. Sorry, Tom.

15:38
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, it's. It's. It's like, I remember I just watched something on Sly Stallone's documentary.

15:46
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

15:47
Tom Stanfill
And I captured the screenshot of him talking about, he goes, I shouldn't have been so focused on making movies. I should have spent time with my family, you know? But his decisions were, he was making decisions, I need to be successful in my career. And that's that he's admitting it. That's more important than spending time with my kids. And now he doesn't like where he ended up.

16:10
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

16:10
Tom Stanfill
Anyway.

16:12
Jon Bircher
Yeah. I mean, even if you didn't make it quite as existential, you know, that's. I think most people can appreciate what they're like on a good day and what they're like on a less good day. And I think people know what it's like to feel like you're passionate about something or you're really in flow with something and all those moments in your life where you felt that real sense of joy or spontaneity. So I think people can identify glimpses, even if they haven't crystallized it, of them at their very best. And why wouldn't we try to make decisions that are in light of that or in line with that? And I think as leaders, what we forget is this point about our decisions mattering, because it's not just, I mean, it is a little bit of rubber hitting the road, isn't it?

16:51
Jon Bircher
It is a little bit about our leadership is visible in our choices, but it's also revealed not just in the choices, but in how we go about making those choices.

17:01
Tom Stanfill
Okay.

17:02
Jon Bircher
Yeah. The process we follow, the way we engage, the how we go about making decisions. Like, if you experience a leader, you can have two leaders making exactly the same decision, and one leader says, I know what the answer to this is. I've done it loads of times before. My gut tells me this. We're going, let's make it happen. Rah, rah. Right. Versus a leader that says, I think I've got a perspective on this, but first of all, I'd love to hear your views. What are the risks associated? How could we do this better? What might be the different options and alternatives? And then let's make a decision together about the way forward. I might feel very differently about the decision and also the leader based on those different approaches. And I'm not saying that one is right and one is wrong.

17:43
Jon Bircher
Situationally, you might need to do one or the other. But actually, my experience of someone's leadership is very different in those two different approaches.

17:52
Tom Stanfill
Interesting. Yeah, I can, and I can see the need for both approaches because sometimes there's not enough information and we can't get, we can't land on a collective, I guess, an agreement where we're all sharing our point of view on the team and we can all agree and the leader needs to make the call. So let's talk more practically, as you said, the river east road, because I really am fascinated by this, because I struggle to make decisions as well. I think we all do. When you look out into the horizon and you say, where are we going? Because, you know, you think there's not enough information a lot of times to make a decision that you can, you know, that you know is the right decision. Or maybe there is.

18:45
Tom Stanfill
So what, why do people, you know what, talk a little bit about how people struggle? What's the, what are the main struggles with making a decision? Is it a process? Is it, is it because they have the misconceptions about it?

19:06
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I feel like there's a couple of different answers to that question. I think the starting point here is that we all have different perspectives and preferences, like many other things when it comes to decision making. So for you it might be that you need to think quite logically and rationally and objectively about data. And for me, my natural preference is to move with my gut. For you it might be. Actually I like to make decisions in a methodical or measured way, and for me I like to make them fast. My aversion to risk might equate to your seeking out risk. You've got these different layers, I guess, that we're all have slightly different preferences and we've got to remember that in different scenarios, different people will show up differently about how they feel about decisions.

19:55
Jon Bircher
I think there's a second level which is also decision making is contextual. Making a decision of what to eat for dinner is very different than whether to acquire a new company. And so our decision preferences might flex differently depending on the decision that I am making.

20:11
Tom Stanfill
Okay.

20:12
Jon Bircher
But I feel like there's a couple of things that I've noticed or we've noticed. One is that I think there's a group of people that seem to almost be drowning indecision. They procrastinate, they get quite anxious, they find decision making quite challenging. They're constantly overthinking almost the level of confidence that they've got and how do they go about making that decision. And they probably need more tools and process and a little bit more encouragement and confidence around decision making. Whereas if you go to the other extreme I think you've also got people who you could possibly even put the word over in front of confident. But they're confident. They're quite naturally intuitive. They would describe themselves as decisive. Leaders can make decisions quite quickly. But go back to the example I just gave.

21:01
Jon Bircher
Maybe they're struggling because now they're being tasked with making decisions as part of a diverse, inclusive, cross functional team. And so now my job is not to just tell everybody what to do. I now have to find a way of leveraging the collective intelligence of the group. And I honestly don't know how, because my approach is just to go with my gut, and I can't explain my gut. And then I think there's another level, which is irrespective of your preference. I see that for some reason.

21:31
Jon Bircher
Well, not for some reason, probably understandably, but I see people hitting big crossroads in their life where maybe something's gone really awry, maybe it's something's happened in their job or their marriage, or something's gone wrong in their leadership, and it's challenged them at their core, where they thought they were good at decision making, or where, broadly, they've coped with decision making. This personal crossroads, something that feels very much about emotion and values and character, is shaken them up, and they know they can't just rely on their gut in this situation. There's too many consequences here about who they are becoming. You kind of almost got these different levels of challenge, and how can we help and support people in those different areas of decision making?

22:19
Tom Stanfill
So I'm hearing you say there's kind of three. Maybe people fall in sort of three categories naturally.

22:28
Jon Bircher
Maybe. I mean, there's probably a lot more, but these are just a couple of that, you know, when you ask that question, life experiences.

22:36
Tom Stanfill
I'm overly. I'm overly analytical, or maybe so. Therefore, I probably procrastinate, probably because there's never enough information to know 100% sure of my decision is going to be. Is going to lead me to where I want to go.

22:52
Jon Bircher
Oh, there's so much information. How am I supposed to work out which bits are important?

22:56
Tom Stanfill
Okay. Yeah, right. Exactly. Which I kind of. I was in the second bucket when I first started. My career is overconfident. You know, gut overconfident. I got it. This is simple. And then, as I realized some of my decisions or lack of detail may have led to some bad outcomes, I think I now sometimes vacillate into category number one, where there's not enough information or there's so much information and I. How do I have the time to write? And then there's the people who lost confidence. Maybe that's the bucket I fall in. I can fall into lost confidence because of life experiences. Or maybe.

23:36
Jon Bircher
Yeah, or maybe we can be all of those things in different situations.

23:40
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. Right. Depending on the type of decision that we're making. So. So I know this is just a, you know, short podcast, but what if I talk to the listeners who, you know, who are obviously in each of those buckets? I'm sure somebody's. Somebody's. One of those buckets is resonating with somebody. What are the. Some big picture things that we can do, John, if we fall into each one of those categories?

24:08
Jon Bircher
Yeah. I think, firstly, what I would say is we got to take a little bit of pressure off ourselves. All the literature that's written about decision making suggests that there are three influences on whether a decision outcome is good or not. One of those things is the quality of the decision. Make really great quality decisions. It's going to improve the likeliness of a good outcome. The second thing is, okay, you can make a decision, but if you don't implement it well, if you don't pull it through, if you don't activate people well, if you don't communicate and track and all of those things around implementation, if you don't do that well, then perhaps that's going to influence the decision outcome. But the third one, which is completely out of our control, is luck or chance. Or maybe we.

24:54
Jon Bircher
Maybe for some of us, we might call it fate, and some of us might call it providence. But there's another factor that's out of our control influences. We chuck our decisions into the world, and they don't always play out like we would like them to play out. There's a risk here that you could do the very best job. You could sweat your decision. You could look at all the data that's out there. You could reach a decision that feels like the most robust decision possible, and it could still all go wrong because you just have bad luck equally. You could be really flippant, make a great decision, make a decision very quickly, and it could be awesome outcome, and you just got lucky.

25:33
Jon Bircher
We've got to be a bit careful that we don't say it's all in our control, and I'm looking for the right decision because there probably isn't a right decision. All there is a better one than you would have made if you hadn't put the time and energy into making it well. So me I think that takes a bit of the pressure out of the system. I can do my best job to make a decision, and I can do my best job to implement that decision, but I've got to realize that, and I'm going to use Annie Duke's terminology here, famous poker player. You know, she says, you know, decision making is a lot more like poker than it is chess. There is that element of chance, and we're playing with probabilities, and we're just trying to nudge up our probability of success.

26:14
Jon Bircher
We can't guarantee the outcome.

26:16
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. And I can see the. The reason that's so important, because if I analyze what happened and I blame myself, which hurts my confidence. Right. And now I'm. Now it's. It's affecting my ability to make for one and two, which is quality decision, quality implementation. It shakes me to the core. It's an identity thing.

26:41
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

26:41
Tom Stanfill
I'm not good enough to make decisions. I'm a bad leader. I didn't figure it out versus. It's just life. This is the way it works. And I think about, I could. I could perfectly apply that into a sales force or sales team, sales seller who's going after a large opportunity in account quality decision. There are definitely criteria that will tell you if you should, you know, is there a real opportunity? Can you win and is it worth winning? And making a good decision is basically looking at all the criteria under those categories, and you can say, this is a good decision. I've got made a quality. I have the criteria, I can make the decision, and then I got to implement it. Right. So am I aligned with the decision making team? Do I know what the decision drivers are?

27:24
Tom Stanfill
If I do know what the decision drivers are, and I know what, who the competition is, and I can do a swot analysis, and I can figure out how to position my solution. So that's an implementation. And then sometimes I just lose.

27:35
Jon Bircher
Yeah.

27:36
Tom Stanfill
Right. Somebody's related to the decision maker that works for the competition. And so it doesn't make me, I can either pick myself up and move on to the next one, or I can. I can, you know, I can take a hit. That's right.

27:50
Jon Bircher
And, you know, the poker analogy might be, you know, you've got a really great hand. I don't know, like a four of a kind, or you've got a. You got a really decent flush, and then you find somebody else has got four aces. I mean, it's not like you made the wrong that probability wise, your decision was a great decision. It just happened to be that somebody had a better hand. That's nothing that you could have done anything about. If you had that same decision again, you would probably still make that same decision. You asked me about practical tools. I think that's almost a philosophical perspective, which is just remember that you can't control the outcome.

28:25
Jon Bircher
And I think there's almost like a top and a tail to decision making, a beginning bit and an end bit, a bookend that we forget about and we often. So we've got a decision to make, and we almost jump in to, okay, I've got to start making this decision, and I've learned, I guess, through testing it with various people that the thing that almost people take away from some of our decision making training is these bookends. So you've got the beginning of our process, or framework, which we talk about as being deciding how to decide. So before you even jump in, let's decide how we're going to decide.

29:04
Jon Bircher
And then you've got the other end of the process, which is, have I created some kind of learning loop to reflect back on the decisions that I've made and understand what was good or less good about that decision making? Because when I start to reflect that, I may get to a conclusion that actually, luck played a massive role here, or I may get to a conclusion that I'm not quite sure I implemented it that well, and therefore we create a learning loop. I mean, when was the last time, and I'm not asking to put you on the spot, but when was the last time you sat down with your leadership team and reviewed the decisions that you've made in the last six months and what actually happened? Because if you're like the majority of leaders that I work with, the answer is probably never.

29:45
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.

29:45
Jon Bircher
And so I think if we can do some stuff, either end of decision making, one is to say, let's just decide how we're going to decide, and then at the end to say, let's just learn a little bit about the decisions we've made and what we might do better. That could be transformative, whichever of those buckets you're in.

30:04
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, that. That. We. We have done that, actually. We did that recently. We talked about we chose the wrong partner. So we discussed what did we learn from that? What do we learn from our mistakes in choosing a partner, but we don't do it enough. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely. But the reason I brought that up as one positive example is it makes me think of all the other examples where we haven't spent time. I love that. So the beginning is decide how we're going to decide. Yeah, I know. We can't give away all the secret sauce and we don't have the time anyway. Can you give us a couple of things to think about when we think about what's the best way to decide how you're going to decide? Any principles there that you can, that we can take away?

30:49
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I mean, I think so.

30:50
Tom Stanfill
I'm looking for some free consulting.

30:52
Jon Bircher
That's absolutely fine. I think. Give it all away. Why not? I think it's like a lot of this stuff, I believe, starts with really time to think and really great questions. That's ultimately what we're doing as coaches, is we are creating an environment where people can just have the space and time to think about something. And then what we'll often do to keep the thinking moving is to ask some great questions. And I think deciding how to decide is a really good example of where actually, if you did nothing but ask a couple of really good questions, it's going to help your decision making. For example, and I asked this question yesterday of a leadership team, what's the core of the issue that you're deciding on? And it's amazing to me how often when we ask that question, what is the core issue?

31:39
Jon Bircher
Or what is the core of the issue that you're deciding on? How many people have different answers about what that issue is? So let's be clear. What is it that we're actually deciding? That's a great question to start with. Another question might be what criteria is actually going to guide us in making the final decision? You mentioned at the beginning, or we mentioned at the beginning about salt and light as metaphors. But metaphors are interesting because often in businesses and in cultures, we have certain metaphors that we lean to. So are there certain word pictures or metaphors that we use when we're thinking about strategy or thinking about decision making? And could we adopt different ones? Is it leaning us towards certain biases in our thinking?

32:26
Jon Bircher
These are just examples, but another question might be about, for this type of decision, who's going to have the final say and how are we going to decide? So what are our roles in the decision making process? So I'm going to just add one more, Tom, because you mentioned earlier about.

32:47
Tom Stanfill
It'S free, it's free. I'm taking it. Keep going.

32:50
Jon Bircher
You mentioned about information earlier, I prefer the word intelligence because I think there's a lot of it. There's a lot of information and misinformation but why not ask upfront before you've started to do the deciding process? Why not ask the question, what intelligence do we need to challenge our assumptions and help us generate more options? And then suddenly what we're doing is we're jumping in, understanding the type of challenge, understanding the decision, and then we can start to think about what intelligence we gather on the journey. So there's just a couple of examples, and I'd be happy to talk to listeners about other ways of stepping back and deciding how to decide.

33:29
Tom Stanfill
I love that. Let's talk about the core issue, because I, that might feel obvious, but I intuitively know that I miss the core issue. I mean, I could be making a major presentation, and because I'm so involved in all the elements of the presentation, I can step away and go, I miss the core issue. Like, the whole thing was about this one thing, and I never clearly communicated this one thing. And it's happened to me. I mean, it doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. I've had over the years somebody say, so what's this all, you know, like, so what do we get? It's like, oh, yeah, you kind of, I missed that because again, we're so close to it.

34:15
Tom Stanfill
So when we think about the core issue, we're trying to think, can you pull an example of a typical decision that somebody's making? Like, I can fleek a voice, like, who's our ideal customer profile, right? Or go to market strategy. That means be things that I might be thinking about, what's the best? What's our marketing strategy related to building, as are things that I think about. And I would think if I look at, okay, what's my core strategy for marketing strategy? The core issue would be leads. Is it, you know, how do we get the most leads? Is that, isn't it that simple? Or is it, how do we miss the core issue? Is really what I'm trying to ask.

34:57
Jon Bircher
Trying to think of a recent example, and.

35:03
Tom Stanfill
Like, I could see, like, related to products, something related to a product or solution. We might miss the core issues to satisfy customer need or customer loyalty. Yeah, we might be thinking it's profit, or we may be thinking about logistic challenges. But it is all about, ultimately, all of this is about clarity. I mean, that's what leadership is clarity.

35:28
Jon Bircher
And sometimes it's subtlety. Like, I can remember a lot of the time where in my previous world where, and it's overlaps with yours, where the client is looking to help either define or refine a robust strategy. And so your mind is to okay, the issue here is they just need greater clarity or they want to pressure test their strategy. When you start asking certain questions or start to dig underneath, what's the real challenge here for you? You start to uncover that actually it's about alignment, or it's about engagement of the team, or it's about helping think through the communication of the strategy, not the development of it. And so by just asking some of those questions, you refine what the core issue is and therefore what the decision is that you're trying to make.

36:14
Jon Bircher
An example over this last week was a client is challenged with a specific target that they have to hit. And the presenting issue is there's not enough market out there to tap into. I don't even know how we're going to achieve that number. However, when you dig into what the real core issue is actually the market is there, just not within the timeframe. So the issue is a timeframe issue, not a market opportunity.

36:44
Tom Stanfill
Okay, brilliant example. Right, right.

36:46
Jon Bircher
And so I think sometimes it's subtlety, but it's, you know, especially if you're a team. Imagine you're a leadership team. And you said marketing strategy. Well, you might mean it's all about leads. Somebody else might mean it's actually about gathering customer insights to understand how we best market it. Somebody else might be the look and feel, the creative flavor of our marketing. But until you have that conversation about what is the real issue and what are we deciding, we might be all approaching the challenge from different perspectives.

37:14
Tom Stanfill
Preston, is there any rules related to the size of team? When, you know, I can hear you as you talk about this, it seems like there's always several people involved in decision making process. Is there any sort of rules or guidelines or frameworks that you would share that says, hey, when you're working to make a collective decision, you should have, the team should look like this? Because you mentioned roles.

37:47
Jon Bircher
Yeah, right.

37:48
Tom Stanfill
They're like, you always should have three or four of these types. There should always be these type, these three roles in a. Because I sometimes, obviously, in all of us, have to, like, if I'm leading a team of ten, you know, I might say, well, I'm going to pull in certain people, or, you know, or you're leading a team of four. And do you have all four, you know? So any thoughts about that?

38:09
Jon Bircher
I feel like I'm going to really frustrate listeners by saying, it depends. Again, I keep coming back to ends because it's contextual. Like some decisions, like if they was a very personal decision that you needed to make, that was, you know, quite sensitive about someone in the organization, you might only gather a people, a couple of people that you intimately trust, and you're in a circle that you might make that decision. That might be two or three people maximum. If there's a organizational wide decision that needs to be made, you might want to bring in more people intentionally, not necessarily all at the same time, but through the process. So I think a little bit of it depends and what's manageable that makes sense. I think the second level to it for me is where in the decision making process.

38:48
Jon Bircher
So, for example, if it's something brand new you've never really explored before, there's lots of different data sources, and it's more of a ideation or divergent part of the decision process, the finding options and alternatives. You might want more people because actually that's creative. But when you get to the point of saying, actually we need to discern which of these options could be the right decision and then make the final decision, it might need to be a smaller group. And then I think the final thing I would just say is it comes back to deciding how to decide. We use a framework which we quite like, and then we've augmented. So I know people like things like Raci and other things which don't get me on my pedestal, because I absolutely loathe raci. But in decision making, we use Dai, right? Who's the decider?

39:42
Jon Bircher
Who are the advisor or advisors that we need to bring in along the way? And there's the I, which is who needs to be informed. So that's the Dai model. Our perspective is coming back to the earlier conversation. Decision outcome in our control is about the quality of the decision and the implementation. So we've augmented it with a second I, so Dai, and that is who's going to implement it. And so when we think about that, we can say, okay, who needs to be in the room and whose opinions do we need to canvas? Because they're experts in this area, or they've done things similarly before, or they've got an opinion that's important to the company. That might be our advisor group. Who are the people we need to think about because they need to be informed or engaged in the process.

40:31
Jon Bircher
Maybe they're further up the hierarchy, or further down the hierarchy, or they might be our customers. And then thirdly, who is it actually is going to implement this decision? Often it's not the decider who implements. So how and when are the right times to bring them into the decision making process so that they get it, so they're bought in, and so that actually the implementation is as good as it possibly can be.

40:53
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, that's very, yeah, very practical. What's the. I forgot, I missed the a.

40:58
Jon Bircher
The d is the decider, the a is the advisor, the I is the informed, and the second I is the implementers.

41:06
Tom Stanfill
Okay. Advisor. Okay, beautiful. Yeah, very helpful. All right. I know we're taking a ton of your time, but this has been. I could talk to you for a day about this, close us out with how does this apply in our personal lives? I'm a parent and maybe that's the best place to. Maybe that's the best place to apply it. I've always put you in a lot of situations where apply to the world, but if I'm a parent, how can you help us make better decisions? As a parent? What can you leave us with? Anything that you.

41:45
Jon Bircher
My goodness. I mean, it's the toughest place to aid, to lead, if we want to use that terminology, but also make decisions. I actually thought you can ask me about salespeople, given that a lot of your audience is salespeople and then, well.

42:01
Tom Stanfill
You can go there if you choose. If you'd rather share about the parenting, we'll take it.

42:10
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I think. Let me just touch on sales just for a moment, which is, as I was thinking of coming on here and knowing your business and probably some of your listener base, it just struck me, actually, we could think about decision making in the same way as we think about leadership and what's my role in it as a sales leader or as a sales manager, or as a salesperson. But I wonder if we spin it and we think about the fact that our customers are making a decision. So our customer actually has to go like, make good quality decisions.

42:43
Jon Bircher
If we put it this way, to make a good quality decision, our customer should go through a process of thinking about how they decide, widening their options and alternatives, gathering the right intelligence to make a decision, and then implement the decision and gain feedback on that decision. It's quite interesting, isn't it, how that decision process is quite similar to the sales process.

43:11
Tom Stanfill
This is worth the pie. This is brilliant. I love this.

43:15
Jon Bircher
I mean, it's a long time ago since I was in sales. I began my career in sales, selling in the pharmaceutical sector. But. But it struck me that actually, when we're trying to sell to people, we try to get quite reductionist, or certainly the people I know who sell and we almost think about, you either buy our product or you don't buy our product. And that's quite narrow thinking. I wonder what a sales conversation would look like when we actually encourage our customers to think about all the different options and alternatives that are available to them to meet their particular need. And then we give them intelligence and data that help them evaluate those options and get to a decision. Now, we might lose some customers along the way, but equally we might win.

43:54
Tom Stanfill
Some customers who youre going to lose them anyway.

43:57
Jon Bircher
Yeah. And then we review with them and then we help them think it through. And actually one of the best ways. When you and I originally talked, you said to me, tell me about high stake decisions. Well, the problem with high stake decisions is were worried we might get it wrong or the consequences are high. Well, what do we do? What do we call it in sales terms? Maybe we call it a trial. So in the same way, experimentation is a great way of helping make decisions where there are high stakes. So maybe we've widened options, we've helped a customer to think through their decision, and then we get them to trial it, we get them to experiment and then get their feedback, and suddenly we've closed the loop in helping them make a better decision. Anyway, that was my reflection, thinking about decision.

44:40
Tom Stanfill
I absolutely love that. And it connects so well and improves some of where we typically start. Our training is to flip the sales process from here's what you want to do as a seller, and here are your stages, which means nothing to the customer, to learning, to figuring out where they are in their journey, their decision making journey, and what are they, how do they see whether they see the problem? What is their strategy? What's their bet? What is it? Stake in their bet. And then what do they do next? And then what do they do next? And then what do they do next? And implementation is one of those stages. And instead of talking about your process, which no one cares about, help them go through their journey and eliminate risk from that.

45:24
Tom Stanfill
And that's your role, is to help them make better decisions. But I like the way you're framing that up. Even better. That's brilliant. I love.

45:34
Jon Bircher
And it meant I avoided the question on parroting, which I have no idea.

45:37
Tom Stanfill
That was also another brilliant move, John. You avoided the whole parenting.

45:42
Jon Bircher
I think my point on parenting is it's really tough. And I think what I've realized, and if I could go back in time, is that maybe part of our job as parents is to do a little bit more of creating the environment that help our kids to understand that we make decisions and there are consequences decisions. And our life is made up of decisions. And rather than trying to tell our kids to do this or that or the other, which, let's be honest, is the easy way sometimes and the lazy way sometimes is just let shine a light on the fact that they are actually making a decision. You're choosing this route, the consequences of that route, versus if you choose this route and if you make that decision, I'll support you. But equally, you've got to.

46:30
Jon Bircher
There are consequences to that decision, and there's a ripple that happens from the decision that you've made. I think that the world might change a little bit if we started to equip our kids to think about the choices that they make as active decisions that influence their future. And I've tried to put that a little bit more and more in practice. My children are getting to be grown up now, and therefore we can have adult conversations about that. But, yeah, shining a little bit of light on the fact that we are making decisions. That's what they are. Decide. The root of the word decide means to cut off alternatives. We're making a choice to go that route instead of that route or that route.

47:10
Tom Stanfill
I love it. Yeah. And if we can teach them the formulas and not try to get them to behave, then we're helping them make better decisions by. That's kind of the way I always looked at it as a parent. And my kids are all have kids now. You met one of them. Yeah, Tyndall, the producer. You know, you instantly move into a certain stage of life, you know, kind of preteen teen. It's all about, I want you to understand the laws that drive everything. And so shining. Shining a light on that truth. But I come back to the, and we're not going to unpack this for everybody, but I think your point about what's the core issue, I think that's the biggest. That may be the biggest takeaway I have if I were thinking about being a parent, is what's really the core issue.

47:55
Tom Stanfill
What do I really want to accomplish as a parent? Right. You know, like some of the, like, I remember making the decision. I'm sure it's because of my parents. I think that was probably the greatest influence on me, is I remember making a decision. There's certain things I will not do when my kids are young. I won't travel a certain amount. I didn't really hardly travel at all because I was clear about my core issues. Like, I was clear about what I really wanted to accomplish. But anyway, that would.

48:28
Jon Bircher
One of my favorite questions I've ever heard asked in decision making circles. That doesn't get asked very often, but I think it's hugely relevant to what you just said came from Andy Stanley.

48:40
Tom Stanfill
Okay, beautiful. Yeah.

48:41
Jon Bircher
He said, I think it's such a great question. So let's take your core issue question, and maybe this is a sub question. What does love require of me?

48:51
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, I love that. Yeah.

48:53
Jon Bircher
Like, so if I'm thinking about this decision, what does love require of me in this situation?

48:58
Tom Stanfill
I love that question. Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. And he also talks about choosing to cheat.

49:06
Jon Bircher
Right.

49:07
Tom Stanfill
Can't get it all done. Right. We can't get it all done. We can't get all the business done. And life's pressures usually lead us to doing things that actually aren't the core issue, but. So we have to cheat. We have to cheat somewhere because we can't get it all done. That really stuck with me. And a lot of times I'll unpack that in a workshop when I'm. When we're teaching our leadership program. It's like, you can't get it all done. So what are you gonna. What? You're gonna cheat somewhere? You're going to. So you're gonna. The core issue is, where am I gonna cheat? That's. That was really one of the. One of the things I did right as a parent, did a lot of things wrong. But is I.

49:41
Tom Stanfill
I knew I wasn't going to miss my kids youth, and I now can see the benefit of doing that. And I would. So glad, because I can't do it over. You got 18 years, right?

49:56
Jon Bircher
Yeah. But for me, I've got this, as I've got more and more into the decision making space is I've realized that it doesn't take much to look at the world that we live in. And it doesn't matter what sector you look in, whether you're looking into politics, whether you're looking into, you know, religion, whether you're looking into business leadership, there are some really poor leadership out there. There are poor decisions being made in the world, and the world has become a really challenging place. Right. And you sometimes look at it and you go, you know, how are people making these decisions? And so for me, I would love to see a world where we are integrating these different bits. It's not just about what is the most rational decision. It's not just about what is the most, you know, the fastest, most decisive decision.

50:39
Jon Bircher
We should be making decisions that are not just, you know, we should be making decisions, right, which integrate character and values and encompass, you know, love and taking people on the journey. Those are all parts of being human, being part of a community. And yeah, I feel like decision making actually is a heart of a lot of this stuff. How can we as parents help our children to better decision makers, at least equipped to be aware of the decisions that they're making and the consequences that those decisions have? Because we know that decisions can have that ripple effect not just in the immediate, but beyond the immediate and possibly even generationally. So they're important. They're critical.

51:22
Tom Stanfill
That's great. I totally agree with that, John. That's beautiful. That's a good place to stop, I think.

51:29
Jon Bircher
Sure. Been a pleasure to join you. Thank you.

51:31
Tom Stanfill
Yeah, John, so before we close out, tell people how they can learn more about your, you're consulting, I think you guys do training as well?

51:42
Jon Bircher
Yeah, I guess the bulk of our work is three chunks. We do one to one leadership coaching. So we work with leaders all over the world. We'll work with leadership teams and work with them on their leadership and their decision making. And then we run training programs around decision making, either bespoke with people or open access here in the UK.

52:05
Tom Stanfill
Okay.

52:05
Jon Bircher
And you can find us on the web. So www. Dot salt and light. Salt light coaching.com or find me on LinkedIn. John J o N Bircher. B I R c H E R. Find me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm usually talking nonsense and all of that stuff.

52:27
Tom Stanfill
I saw some of your nonsense and I liked it. It. John, thank you so much. It's been loved. Loved everything you shared. And I'm definitely going to be chewing on all this truth and hopefully making better decisions.

52:40
Jon Bircher
Thank you so much, Tom. Thanks for having me.