What might Concorde crashing on take-off, and the Iraq War Inquiry tell us about making business decisions?

I often end up in situations where I am helping businesses make tricky decisions, some of which may have been put off for some time. They usually involve big, important things that affect people, profit, livelihoods, even lives.

You know the scenario – it’s an important decision, but practical concerns are also weighing on your mind and your time. You know that the “correct right answer” is to get everyone involved, explore every possible permutation, input and outcome, test and measure, review then finally deploy. You also know that your “gut feel right answer” is just to make a decision and get on with it, trusting your experience.

Which route do you take? On the one hand, you could avoid making a spectacular wrong decision. On the other, you can avoid the sort of delay and debate that makes businesses grind to a halt on things that should be being blitzed and improved.

This is where I tell people about “The Headline Test”.

Take a few minutes out to imagine how your decision process and conclusion would be reported in the papers or on TV, if things went really wrong, or if it was spectacularly successful.

What would the journalists home in on? Inspired guesses, missed factors, assumptions you made? Things you did investigate? Things you didn’t? People you did or didn’t speak to.

What would the BBC say? The Times? The News of The World? The Daily Mail? Trade press? How would a reasonable person react? How would you react if someone was recounting the story to you?

I often find this to be a thought-provoking question, that frequently initiates debate and focuses minds on the external view of what we are discussing.

Of course, this is just one vantage point from which to view the options you may face, but as I write, with both the Iraq War inquiry and the trial of both companies and individuals (right down to a maintenance engineer) for the Concorde crash under way, we never quite know what decisions of ours may come under scrutiny in future.

What would the papers say? It makes me think, what about you…?