Decision Engineering + Resiliency with Michelle Florendo (part 1)

Spring heralds a time of renewal, and what better way to embrace this season of change than by refining our decision-making skills with decision engineer and podcast host Michelle Florendo? Unlock the potential within and discover how the art of decision engineering can usher in clarity and reduce the stress often intertwined with choice-making. This episode traverses the powerful landscape of resilience, illuminating the ways informed decisions act as catalysts for personal growth and recovery from life's inevitable setbacks.

Parenting is our first arena of exploration, where we consider the lasting impact of empowering our children to make their own decisions. Michelle and I exchange stories and experiences, revealing how such practices cultivate a sense of agency and transform choices into opportunities for our young ones. And it's not just about the kids – we delve into how this principle of control resonates through our personal tales, including a touching narrative involving my mother-in-law, demonstrating how structured decision-making can significantly bolster our resilience during life's challenging moments.

As we conclude, we examine the delicate interplay between heart and mind when facing life's most profound decisions. I recount the emotional journey facilitated by an end-of-life planning retreat, highlighting the necessity of balancing emotion with logic for a path forward that aligns with our deepest values. This conversation is just the beginning; join us for part two as we continue to reveal the transformative power of decision engineering. Make sure to subscribe and share with those ready to harness their decision-making prowess and kindle the flame of resilience.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

In the Grand Theater of Life. We all seek a comeback, a resurgence, a rekindling of our inner fire. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience. This is not just another podcast. This is a journey, a venture into the heart of human spirit, the power of resilience and the art of reigniting our passions.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Welcome back to another episode of Reignite Resilience. I am your co-host, natalie Davis, and I'm so excited to be back with all of you today. Pam, how are you doing? I am good.

Speaker 1: 0:39

It's Friday afternoon. We've got a little spring snow today. It's already melted off the grass. The grass is starting to turn a little green, which makes me very, very happy.

Speaker 2: 0:51

I'm over the snow, natalie. I love it, I love it. You've seen even tulips that are starting to butt up in a couple of yards, which is so nice. We get a new thing here in Colorado, we get our tulips that are dusted with snow. It's fine, it's fine, it does. Well, we have a very special guest today and I am super excited to visit with Pam. Why don't you kick us off and introduce our guest so that we can share with our listeners who's joining us and then dive?

Speaker 1: 1:19

in Awesome. Well, I am super excited about our guest as well, and today joining us is Michelle Florendo. She is a Stanford-trained decision engineer and executive coach for Type A professionals. She is on a mission to teach people how to make decisions with less stress and more clarity. Over the years, michelle has led workshops for audiences across the globe, showing hundreds of professionals how to use the principles of decision science to grow their impact and fulfillment. She teaches a course on business decision-making for Stanford Continuing Studies, helped redesign the decision-making curriculum for Stanford's famous design your Life Courses, is a faculty coach for Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute and hosts the podcast Ask a Decision Engineer. So welcome, michelle. We're super excited for you to be here today. So I'd love for you to just start out and tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're located, just as much as you can about yourself.

Speaker 3: 2:20

Yeah Well, I'm sending you a bit of sunshine from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Speaker 2: 2:26

I'll take it.

Speaker 3: 2:27

Thank you, I'll be waiting at you from the West Coast, a Bay Area native, and as you mentioned in the bio, I'm a decision engineering executive coach. What wasn't mentioned in the bio Also mom, just two small children, four and seven, and all of the giggles and the challenges. Yes, I expect. Yes, yes, I love it, but also just really excited to be here because I find that this topic of resilience is so important, like so important in the world that we live in today.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Absolutely Well. I'd like to hear a little bit more about what it is that's decision, so tell me. It's called decision engineer. So tell me about that, because I had never heard that term before and so so curious about that.

Speaker 3: 3:18

Right, so I mean decision engineering, and again, this is just like a nod to my academic background and what I had studied at Stanford. If you think about engineering, right, engineering is usually a discipline where you are building solutions based on like a structured set of principles, right? So chemical engineering, building like chemical solutions, computer engineering, building solutions, mechanical and so on. So just the principles of decision engineering are all about how do you optimize decision making, both in process and with the data that you have in order to arrive at a solution.

Speaker 1: 3:55

Okay, very interesting. Okay, and what made you get into that? Or is that what you went into Stanford and that's like that's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 3: 4:02

I knew I was going to go in and want it to be an engineer. I was one of those kids who is really good at math and science and, like my parents, are immigrants, and so when I said I didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer, engineer was acceptable Engineering. And you know like I looked at some of those different disciplines chemical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering. So my background is I'm Filipino, my parents were immigrated from the Philippines and I remember there was an outreach event for Filipino students and one of the Filipino alums had studied industrial engineering, which then morphed into this greater department of management science, of which decision engineering is a discipline.

Speaker 3: 4:47

And I was like what is industrial engineering? What is that? He said it's the engineering of efficiency. I said, ooh, like that sounds interesting efficiency optimization. And then again, entering into this department, when I looked at all the different concentrations of study, there was one called finance and decision engineering and I was like decisions, wait, we make decisions all the time, and there's always been this field of how you can do this better. How did I not know about this before? And so that's what I found really fascinating and, yeah, I dove in to be like headfirst and something that I've brought with me ever since.

Speaker 1: 5:27

I love it, and so you help people make decisions with less stress and clarity and more clarity. So tell us, are there tricks or tools or anything? I'm so interested about this, like how do you do?

Speaker 3: 5:40

that Well one I think it's. There is structure to every decision and that's part of what I bring from my engineering background. Granted, there can be a lot of like quantitativeness calculations, probabilistic analysis, but you know, typical everyday people don't necessarily need it at that level. But I think it's useful for everyone to even know that there are three components to every single decision. It can be big, small, individual group, personal, professional. There are always three components and if you can kind of deconstruct your decision into those three components, it provides a clear path for moving through the decision. Can you briefly?

Speaker 1: 6:21

tell us those three.

Speaker 3: 6:22

Yes, it's like now I'm intrigued.

Speaker 3: 6:26

So every decision has three components. One is objectives. So this is you know, what matters to you in the outcome? Something matters, right. Well, else we wouldn't be spending this time trying to make a decision that's going to impact the future. So objectives are all about. What is it that you want to see? What are your preferences in the outcome? Another component is options. So that's what are the different courses of action you can choose among? I think this is the component that we're most familiar with when it comes to decision making. Right, like I, need to decide between this or that, but I think one of the common mistakes people make is they just take the obvious options or the initial options are considering as the only options, without going a step beyond to think more creatively about what other options might exist. So there's objectives, options, and then the third component is information.

Speaker 3: 7:24

And this is, specifically, what information do you have on how your options deliver against your objectives? So you kind of have to define what are your objectives first in order to know what is the relevant information, because there are going to be lots of information, but if it doesn't relate back to your objectives, it's not information that matters.

Speaker 1: 7:46

It's not relevant yeah. Yeah, and so I could see how this would absolutely relate to having a coaching practice, because really a lot of what you do as a coach is help people see beyond, where they're kind of like narrow focus, like expanding their possibilities Absolutely, and so taking them through these steps. Yeah, that's amazing. I love that. So got in, went to Stanford, got this degree and then did you go right into coaching. Is it something that's newer?

Speaker 3: 8:18

Yeah, the coaching thing is definitely newer, like if you had rebounded talk to me when I graduated and told me I would be on this path. It'd be like what, wait? What is coaching? What? So after undergrad I went into the corporate realm for a number of years. So I started management consulting and then went into brand management, general management, and then was on that track, went to get my MBA at Berkeley and was actually at Berkeley that I was first introduced to coaching. One of the professors there had trained me as a communications coach. I still remember, two weeks before graduating from grad school, I remember my mentor asking me why have you never thought about coaching as a profession? You seem to enjoy it. You seem to be really good at it. I didn't know. It was a thing.

Speaker 2: 9:07

Yes, I'm still getting familiar with this?

Speaker 1: 9:12

Yes, that's so great.

Speaker 2: 9:17

I love it. I can imagine that everything that you've learned so far now is challenged or put to the test, or let's just say the principles are put to the test with the littles. Right, with a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, it's very inquisitive age. When you talk about being a decision engineer or even decision engineering, I think about my kids when they were younger and parenting. When my kids were younger, I picked up a lot of my own parenting style that I was given when I was a child. You don't get an option. Here's what we're having for dinner. Thank you for joining us. I have seen this progression in parenting style, where parents are intentionally giving their kids the options, like laying it out and letting them go through what I think we historically called problem-solving. Let's go through this in problem-solve so that you can determine what you want to do or the choice you want to make. I'd love to just hear how the littles have helped informing how you look at decision engineering over the last couple of years.

Speaker 3: 10:18

Yeah, it's interesting because, as much as I teach about decision-making to adults, right, like either in my coaching practice and the corporate setting and Stanford Continuing Studies, I always get this question about this is so useful. Why didn't they teach us this back then? How do you teach this to your kids? I think it starts with, like you said, even just introducing the idea of them having a choice. Yes, so often, and this is part of the reason why, like, I'm so excited to be here with respect to resilience, right, Because I find that resilience is all about returning back to what is the power that we have in ourselves. Yes, like, little kids typically don't have that much power, but it's a concept we can introduce to them, right. Like, oh, actually, there are options. Hey, you have the power to choose, even if we are limiting those options, would?

Speaker 1: 11:13

you like broccoli or Brussels sprouts. Exactly. Yes, I'm still a choice.

Speaker 2: 11:19

You still get to choose. Yes.

Speaker 3: 11:22

Right, but like, even just kind of like helping cultivate that posture of oh, like, what are the options I have here? What is the power that I can invoke here to you know, like, carve my path? I think it's such a useful and powerful thing to instill, even as children, because then they'll continue to like. One of my mentors, ralph Keney, would talk about how a lot of people just think about decision problems. When I have a problem now, I have to make a decision. But the more powerful approach is to think about decision opportunities, like how can we always be thinking about where we have the opportunity to carve our own path or shape the world in the way that we want it?

Speaker 2: 12:02

I love that.

Speaker 3: 12:04

I love that.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Yeah, well, as you have worked with different groups and organizations and individuals just over the last couple of years, bringing that back to resiliency, what are some of the things that you've seen that have been really helpful as individuals are working to overcome adversity or even just challenging situations that they may have in their business or with the organization that they're with? I mean?

Speaker 3: 12:26

I think, one it comes back to again refocusing on where do we have power, where do we have agency, where do we have the power to choose and act? Because I find that oftentimes you know, there's this exercise that I give people when they're in the midst of really tangled decisions, called a decision inventory, and as they're reflecting on the output of the exercise, sometimes one thing that people notice is, wow, I'm spending so much time on energy, on the parts that I don't have control over, versus the parts of the decision that I do have power and control and influence over. And I think even just that reframe can be so useful. Let's refocus our power on the part that we can control, because the other thing that I teach about is like, when we think about what makes a good decision or a bad decision, most people are afraid of making bad decisions, right, myself included.

Speaker 3: 13:22

Yes, I mean, there's something there that that's useful to double click into and that's you know what does it mean to make a bad decision or the wrong decision? The thing is, most people believe in this myth that the quality of our decision so whether our decision is bad or good is equal to the quality of the outcome, exactly. Oh, if the outcome's bad, that means I made a bad decision, but if the outcome's good, that means I made a good decision. Right, but it's not actually true. Right, because we control the decision, but the outcome is a function of our decision and things that we don't control.

Speaker 2: 13:59

Yeah, right, and so there's so much emphasis that's always placed on that outcome. Right, it's, it's, I'm going to make this, but this decision based off of the outcome and not thinking about the actual choice at hand, but the one that you have control over the element?

Speaker 3: 14:13

Yeah, like what's the process, like what are the things that are important to me? Can I think creatively about the options?

Speaker 1: 14:18

Options yeah.

Speaker 2: 14:21

Absolutely. I think that's tremendous and and I think we do that in every single area of our lives, right, personal or professional, it doesn't matter. We think about okay, if this happens, what is the end result? And I love that you bring it back to. We always reference Covey's circle of control.

Speaker 3: 14:38

Yeah, Influence and concern yes, oh my gosh, we spent sometimes too much time in the concern, in the concern. Let's bring it back to the circle of control, circle of influence, because that's where we can actually do things.

Speaker 2: 14:50

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I love that. That's huge, that's really big.

Speaker 1: 14:56

Now I would love for you to share with us and you and I talked about it on the phone this pretty significant event that you just went through with your mother-in-law, and now this something that you're focusing on as well. Would you share that story with the?

Speaker 3: 15:11

listeners. Yeah, I'm going to take a deep breath because I this is it's a story that I'm still metabolizing because it happened just last year. Again, like a lot of what I do, teaching about decision making, like how is it that we can focus on the parts that we can control? And I think it's something that I didn't talk about earlier was especially as I've spent the past 10 years as a coach. I realize it's not just the cerebral or cognitive part of decision making that matters, it's also the emotional part, especially when we're making personal decisions Right. So about I guess, a year and a half ago now, there's a significant event in my life that like completely tested all of my abilities to like be with all of these things that I teach and also like apply it to a very real and personal situation, and that's when my mother-in-law.

Speaker 3: 16:08

So a little bit of context I grew up in the Bay Area, my husband grew up in the Bay Area. Our parents are here. We have stayed here because our commitment is to take care of our parents as they age. So we're very much that sandwich generation. We also have parents and I'm very glad that we stayed here. My husband is from 10 minutes away from where we live and that's where his parents had lived, because in November of 2022, we received news that my mother-in-law had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. And sorry, it's a little raw, because I realized we laid her to rest a year ago, yesterday, but I realized, like in that moment, like there's so much that we couldn't control, but there are also still a lot of decisions that still needed to be made. This is happening right in between, like my husband and my 40th birthday, and so we had had a weekend retreat, like we were going to go away for our birthday, like in Sonoma. We'd already booked like a couple days. We got childcare with my parents, my kids off to those grandparents. And, as this was happening, I remember just being at my in-laws house and I blurred it out like why don't you come? Why don't you come with us? Come with us to Sonoma, let's have all the conversations that we know we need to have. Let's talk about the decisions that need to be made. Ultimately, decision-making is about being able to shape life to how you want it.

Speaker 3: 17:46

I basically facilitated an end-of-life planning retreat for my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, my husband. I just remember in the midst of getting news like that, there are so many different things to consider. I remember the first thing we did was, after we checked in, like the found a cozy spot in front of the fire in the lobby, I asked the three of them to just write down what are the decisions we need to talk about, what are the questions that we have, what are the things we need to discuss. Put them all on post-its because, again, I'm a coach of facilitators, so I had my whole kit. Put them on post-its, I gathered them up and I put them on a paper and put it to the side. Then I asked everyone to chart out on their pieces of paper the stages that we were going to be moving through together, like this initial phase of digesting the news, the period of time where she would be really physically impacted, the period of time where we knew it would be the end, and then the period of time we would live on without her. I asked everyone we went stage by stage, person by person I have to write down how do you want to feel as you move through that stage?

Speaker 3: 19:08

Because when it comes to personal decisions, like if you think about like I talked about objectives, right, we can have certain objectives for whatever part of life. But if you ask why, like oh, why is money important? Because I want to be able to support my family. Why is that important? Because I want to know that they are okay. Why, if you keep on asking the why and this is an exercise to get down to fundamental objectives what is at the heart behind every single objective is how do you want to feel at the end of the day?

Speaker 3: 19:36

And so that's where we started, like how, how did each of us want to feel? How did she want to feel? And then what did that mean? The criteria and the objectives that would drive the myriad of decisions that we knew we would have to make, and also even the ones that we would have to make that we couldn't foresee. Like I still remember, like a couple months in, when she was going through chemo, and it wasn't, it wasn't producing like what she wanted. She was just like where's that piece of paper? Like this is not what I wanted.

Speaker 2: 20:11

This is not how I wanted to feel.

Speaker 3: 20:13

I had to make a new decision and like that's when that's when you know like we made the decision to move into hospice, which was the right move, for you know again what, what she wanted. Again, in the midst of like feeling like there was so much that we couldn't control, it was so comforting to be able to, to get refocus on well, like, what are the things that are important, were the things that are important to her, to us, and how do we move through decisions to deliver against as much of that as we can?

Speaker 2: 20:48

It's such a powerful process to take a family through and to also be a part of right, like. You're playing a pivotal role in that, because you know that your, your family dynamic is going to be impacted. Each of those phases that you talk about, each of those stages that you guys went through to identify what do you want, how do you want to feel. I think that's that's significant, especially when we're talking about transition of life, and oftentimes we, those type A power people that want to get into the here's what needs to happen. Right, we need to make X, y and Z decision, check the boxes. Let's move on to the next thing. We don't pause and I'm making that as a week, as it's an I statement we don't pause to think okay, well, what do the other people that are impacted by this, what do they want to feel in all of these stages and phases as we progress through? It's a beautiful process. I'm so glad that you were able to take your family through that.

Speaker 3: 21:43

Thanks for acknowledging that. I think one of the things that I I sometimes forget and my friends had to repeatedly tell me in the process was that, like I'm not just there to help facilitate it, but like I was in it too, you were in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:59

Do you feel like going through that process with everybody that it helped prepare you better for? I know you can never be fully prepared for it, but prepare you better for going through this with her.

Speaker 3: 22:12

Yeah, I mean, I think it provided some North stars, yeah Right. Like, in the mess of all the different like things and the emails with Kaiser and like trying to figure out like all of these like logistics that no one wants to have to deal with, when going through all of this, it was useful to be able to keep coming back to like okay, this is how she wanted to feel, this is how we wanted to feel, this is how this is the support we each need in the process in order to like, feel helpful and loving and present and like all of these different things. And so I think it again. I think sometimes, when we're moving through so much that feels like, is it met, like he said, circle of concern, it's useful to be able to know what are in the circle of control and influence, yeah, which I think is so important in resilience.

Speaker 1: 23:06

I think people that are more resilient do have that ability to know that what is in their control and what is out of their control and what they can focus on.

Speaker 2: 23:17

We hope that you have enjoyed part one of our two part interview with Michelle Florendo, the decision engineer and coach.

Speaker 2: 23:24

Who would have known that, as we have navigated through life, the decisions that we've made are not necessarily based off of the information or the options that we have, but actually on the outcome. All of this time we may have been focusing on the wrong thing. Make sure that you come back and join us for part two, as Michelle continues to dive into her own personal story of using this personal framework of decision engineering in her life for herself and her family members, but then also giving us additional tools that we can use to help us in our decision making process moving forward. We hope to see you soon. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Reignite Resilience. We hope that you had amazing a-has and takeaways. Remember to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like it and download the upcoming episodes, and if you know anyone in your life that is looking to continue to ignite their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes and, until then, continue to reignite that fire within your hearts.