An incident today made me think about decision making. We know when we are making a big decision that will have large ramifications. It could be buying a house,  getting married or any number of other large endeavors. But how many times have we made what seemed like a very small decision at the time that ended up having huge ramifications for ourselves or others? It could even be life changing.

You hear about the stories of people who were late to work on 9/11 and their decision to dally saved them their lives. The people who missed their flight, only to have it crash.  Of course on the opposite side of the coin you always hear about the victim that was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This morning I was rescuing my damsel in distress who decided she didn’t have enough time to stop for gas. It was raining heavily when I got to her and because of a guard rail she was unable to pull far off the road.  It took about two seconds of me standing behind her car trying to gas it up the rain with 18 wheelers whizzing by at 70 miles an hour to decide that I may become one of those wrong place, wrong time kind of people.  I will tell you one thing if someone from NASCAR could have seen me this morning I think I would have a new job.  All those Sundays watching the races on TV made me sure that this was definitely the time for the old splash and go.

Since I am home writing this,  it is obvious this story had a happy ending.

My whole job in managing people is teaching them how to properly make decisions. We will often have an exercise of evaluation after something went terribly wrong, or not as well as we would have liked. Unfortunately sometimes the best way to figure out the right process is to muck it beyond recognition the first time you try it.

So you have punished yourself to this point and yet the question remains. What does the cat have to do with anything?

Nothing really, it is a stray that is currently running loose at my in law’s house. They are trying to get me to adopt it.  On one hand she is kind of cute, but on the other hand she is a cat. What to do, what to do.

I just can’t decide.

Maybe I’ll just flip a coin.