Speed of decision making

I returned from a family trip over the Christmas season, sat down and uploaded the 4 SD cards to my computer hard drive.  The final tally was 2,600 photos and videos that I had captured over our two week trek across Costa Rica.  This is an average number of pictures for a trip of this length, however one thing struck me while picking out the select group of photos that I would share; I would take several pictures of the same scene, slightly changing the exposure settings and reframing the shot.   This is very common in the this age of digital photography where the most popular camera is an iPhone and more pictures are shared on Facebook in a day then used to be developed in a year.  I felt I might have been taking pictures too fast.  Instead of taking my time to compose and capture the right shot the first time, I instead utilized both my LCD screen and multiple shutter strokes to get one good picture.

After selecting and editing my pictures I put my fancy DSLR down by my Canon AE-1 camera, a camera that was handed down to me from my grandfather, a film camera with no automatic settings or digital screen for reviewing on the go.    I did not think much of it other than briefly admiring the retro look and making certain I did not knock it on the floor.  Later that week I was walking past a camera shop in Kingston and on impulse bought two rolls of black and white film.    A roll of film allows one to take about 36 pictures, a number I could easily take over a 30 minute photo session with my digital SLR, however his roll of film took me the better part of two weeks to shoot.   I found myself analyzing composition, exposure and deciding if this was the picture I wanted to take as one of my 36 available photos.

After I had the roll developed I was reflecting in my office on how this is similar to the decision-making process that leaders go through every day.

Lake Ontario - Canon AE-1 Film Camera

Lake Ontario - Nikon D7000 digital SLR

We often rely on a set of heuristics and make quick decisions based on experience and an appropriate amount of risk based on limited information.   This is much like shooting digital photographs, you can still make beautiful art, but sometimes we make the decision to push the shutter based on previous pictures we have done and the knowledge that post-processing will perfect the end photo.

I do not consider myself a luddite, so I still will own several digital cameras and look towards photographic innovation, however I am going to occasionally step back and shoot film.  With leadership this translates to taking some of those decisions we make automatically and see how we can reframe the problem differently.   Ask questions rather than make the decision and dig down into root cause.  Find our film version of decision making to occasionally replace the heuristics we often use.