Information Management for Organizational Effectiveness
Wednesday, 24 Sep 2025 | Pondering our decision-making abilities
Is individual decision making a learned or an intuitive skill?
What examples of individual decision making resonate with you?
Admiral Raymond Spruance at Midway in 1942
Watch only the first 20 minutes of this video
Decisions under conditions of great uncertainty
Admiral Spruance then made the critical call to attack as he realised that the opportunity had arisen when he could catch the Japanese fleet off guard when they were refuelling and rearming their bombers ... It was a massive risk, as Spruance knew the Japanese fleet was right at the limit of his planes' range. The first waves of attacks were disastrous for the Americans ... For a little over a minute the Japanese would have felt victorious, until the dive-bombers saw the aircraft carriers which were covered with aircraft, fuel and explosives ... Within seconds two Japanese fleet carriers were on fire and then only minutes later Yorktown's dive-bombers attacked and destroyed a third. The fatal mistake of leaving bombs on the decks in order to save time rearming hastened the demise of the carriers. The remaining Japanese carrier struck back hitting Yorktown which had just launched an attack which would sink the remaining Japanese carrier. After efforts to save the Yorktown, she eventually succumbed after being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. In an afternoon the face of the war had changed, it was the turning of the tide. The Japanese still hoped to engage the US Fleet in a surface action but Spruance withdrew his fleet rather than pursue the enemy as he did not want to meet the remainder of the Japanese fleet head on, particularly without battleships in a night action where the advantage he now had in the air would be diminished, as he rightly feared the remainder of the Japanese surface fleet.
Read Admiral Raymond Spruance, USN, a 2011 article on the topic in March 2009 edition of the (Australian) Naval Historical Review.
You don't have to read these unless you wish to ...
... but we might touch upon them in conversation
So the real question isn't "How do I remove unpredictability and randomness from my business?" It's "How do I deliberately make and structure decisions to increase the chance that novel ideas or outcomes lead to improvement?"
Three Proven Ways To Navigate Uncertainty by Alison Randel in The Ready, 28 July 2016