CSChristoffel SneijdersThree brains: head, heart and gut for decisions you keep deferring

3 Brains Decision-Making: How Leaders Can Use Head, Heart, And Gut To Make Tough Business Choices

10 Jul 2023 · 2 min

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1:50

In this segment, Christoffel Sneijders presents a managerial dilemma where a department of ten must cut five positions. The board offers three options: lay off the older workers (physically optimal but financially and personally damaging for them), lay off the younger workers (easier re‑employment for them but less efficient for the department), or apply a LIFO (last‑in‑first‑out) rule, resulting in a mixed age team. Sneijders asks the audience which they would choose and reveals that 80‑90% of coaches would avoid the binary choices, while 90% of production/finance directors favor the older‑worker option. He uses this contrast to illustrate how different stakeholder mindsets (head‑driven finance vs heart‑driven coaching) affect willingness to change, the emotional load of decisions, and ultimately the success of coaching interventions. The excerpt underscores the importance of integrating head (logic), heart (values), and gut (intuition) when making tough business choices and highlights the mismatch that can undermine change initiatives.

Chapters

So just imagine that you are manager of an company. The revenues and the profit stayed behind. And actually now they have something like they have to lose people and cut down costs. And for your department of 10 people, it means 5 of your employees should be made redundant. The board gives you some ideas and they say, you know, you can let go of all the older employees in your department. Production-wise, it would make totally sense, and it's actually the best option because the job is rather physical. What does it mean for those 5 people when they lose their job? Financial and personal stress, because they will never get a job again based on their age. The second option the board gave you was, yeah, we can also let go of the 5 younger people. They will find a job easy. The third one is they give you the LIFO option, last in, first out. What does it mean for your, or your department? It would mean you have 3 older and 2 younger employees in your team. The third option is actually that you go back to the board to say, I cannot choose one of these options. Which one would you choose? 80% of the coaches will choose C or D. Then 90% of the production and/or finance directors will choose A. Well, now just imagine a couple of questions on that. How easy would it, would it be for you To start sharing option A. What would happen with you internally? How would it feel? Why I ask this? Because just imagine, think of the production and finance manager. If we have so many issues with changing, how easy is it for them then to change? There's a mismatch of connection and understanding, and we could have lesser coaching results.