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In a moment of self-pity during his troubled reign as the notorious president who kicked off the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover once confided to friends: “I’m tired of making decisions–one after another all day long. My view of heaven is a place where no one ever has to make a decision.”

Ever felt like Hoover did?  Most of us have. While deliberating over tough decisions, we feel about as chipper as we do sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s office.  Self-esteem dips.  Optimism slips.  Anxiety rises.  One of the primary reasons why is because we haven’t identified our Decision Pulse. We each need to have one super-criterion upon which we can base nearly all of our decisions.

Decision Pulses in Action

One of the best examples of this comes from Southwest Airlines. As told in the book Buck up, Suck up...etc. (and retold in Made to Stick) the decision pulse at Southwest Airlines is that they are “THE Low Fare Airline.” That one principle guides virtually every decision they make from how they market and to whom; to which airports they use; and even down to what food they serve on each flight (spoiler alert: it’s just a bag of peanuts).  Longtime CEO and co-founder, Herb Kelleher, believed that virtually anyone could run his phenomenally successful airline if they always kept in mind that one principle.

Every SWA employee is encouraged to do whatever they can to excel in their area whether that’s handling baggage, booking flights or managing corporate functions. But no matter what, their choices must support (or at least not conflict with) being “THE low fare Airline.”

Today, that pulse still clearly guides the Southwest decision not to charge for checked bags…a choice that has become all too trendy for their competitors.   On the other hand, if their competitor’s Decision Pulse is to be something like a cruise ship in the sky, then they probably need that extra cash to feed their luxury machines.  Therein lies the beauty–and in fact the necessity–of the Decision Pulse: every organizations’ pulse can be different.  You just have to know yours.

Why the Decision Pulse Works

Making decisions is such a chore because we’re often faced with multiple options that all seem good but for different reasons. Your decision pulse is like your ultimate trump card.  It helps you instantly sift through a whole bunch of good options in order to find the best option.  At Southwest Airlines, it would seem very reasonable to make your customers happy by serving them a delicious meal instead of peanuts, wouldn’t it?  Customer satisfaction is always a good thing, right?  However, a good meal will raise expenses so it could present quite a conundrum. What is Southwest Airlines to do: make customers happy or keep expenses low?  That would ordinarily be a real brain-bender of a decision if Kelleher hadn’t clearly defined the company’s Decision Pulse. Fortunately, he did.  So the potential brain-bender became a no-brainer.  Serving a more expensive meal will conflict with being “THE low-fare airline” so it just ain’t happenin’. Period. [See more Decision Pulse examples at Nike and The Home Depot]

Essentially, the Decision Pulse takes hundreds of seemingly unique-as-snowflake decisions and puts them into one big bucket governed by a single guiding principle.  So instead of making hundreds of new decisions every day like we typically do, it allows us to make only one decision hundreds of times.  Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

How to Find Your Pulse

The three steps below should help quickly find your pulse:

1. List all of the reasons why a customer might choose you over a competitor. In other words, what is that you do well that your target market actually cares about? Southwest Airlines does many things well. They have an incredible ontime percentage. Their flight attendants and gate agents are some of the happiest and funniest in the industry. But they know that above all else, Low Price is the first and most important consideration for their customers. Everything else is icing on the cake.

For you, your team or your company, your differentiator could include low cost, high service quality, high service speed, high product quality, industry expertise, expertise in a particular subject, convenient location, well-known reputation, personal connections between your customers and your employees…etc.  When they have a choice, why do people choose you?

2. Identify what makes you unique. Put a “B” for “best” next to all of those principles on which you can probably be better than all of your competitors. It’s not necessarily what’s “most important,” and you don’t have to currently be the best in those areas.  These are simply the areas in which you already possess the raw materials to be #1 if you really tried.

3. Rank each of the “B” principles. Base your ranking on which principles you can most easily become best due to either a) your unique strengths or to b) your competitors’ uniform weaknesses. Whichever principle you rank “1″ is your Decision Pulse.

May the pulse be with you.

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