I believe there’s a valuable skill that all people should have, and it is the skill of understanding why other people are making the decisions they are making. This can be a difficult skill to hone, and I was thinking about why this is. Here’s some thoughts I have on why it can be difficult.

Sometimes it’s because you don’t agree with the decision maker’s goals and priorities. Let’s say a senior business leader decides to lay off 500 employees. Your immediate thought as a line engineer might be the common arguments against such a move, to include: loss of legacy knowledge, loss of capacity in production/development/delivery, and in fact perhaps a literal reduction in the organization’s ability to generate revenue. But if the decision maker has other goals in mind (“reduce overhead or labor costs”, or “temporarily bump the stock price”) and they have prioritized that goal over all others, then there’s actually a reason for their decision. This doesn’t even mean whether their decision is right or wrong, but you need to be able to at least follow the line of reasoning that person had to make the decision. I have found that many people seem to just outright deny that someone else could have different prioritization of goals, and thus seem unable to understand why a decision was made.

Other times I think sometimes people are hesitant to dive into this because there might be distaste at the root causes of the other person’s decision. If a decision was make to promote one person over the other, the decision maker’s reasons might be something mild you disagree with (“Person 1 had a college degree and Person 2 didn’t”), but you can at least understand it. But maybe the reason is something else (“I am prejudiced against Person 1 because of race/gender/religion/etc”), and even though you might logically understand, the notion is so distasteful you don’t want to even consider it, either for your own fear of being judged or because the distaste is too much for you to fathom.

The reason this skill is important is you are frequently in a place where other people are making decisions that impact you, and your actions may feed into information or activities that rely on the decisions they make. You yourself then have to make your own decisions on whether to understand their goals and align with them (even if you disagree), or decide that your disagreement is enough that you either actively take action against it (such as via advocacy or resistance) or decide to leave that organization altogether.