I am the proud father of four children ranging in ages from 6 to 14. I’ve seen more than my fair share of animated movies and the soundtracks that accompany them. My youngest child, Elizabeth, is a big fan of the Frozen movies. There is a silly song in Frozen 2 that makes me think.

Olaf is one of the most beloved characters in the Frozen series. He is a snowman that is alive thanks to Elsa’s magical powers. He has an endearing child-like personality. Upon entering the enchanted forest in Frozen 2, he breaks into song when he can’t explain the magic on display before him. If you haven’t seen it, please check it out here:

You can also find the lyrics here.

I’ll have all the answers when I’m older

The message of this short song is very clear. The simple and straightforward answer to every puzzling situation is age and time. If you don’t understand something, it’s simply because you are too young. Give it a little time, and everything will clear up nicely.

Disney writes their films for kids, but they also intentionally entertain the parents that buy the tickets and bring their kids to Disney movies. By the time you are old enough to have a kid that wants to watch animated movies, you have most certainly figured out that age does not bring all of the answers. In fact, if you are a parent of a young one, you are probably as bewildered and confused as you have ever been.

Executive decision-making

Let’s move this discussion from the movie theater to the office. As a corporate executive, one of my primary job functions is decision-making. My team, my leaders, and the company owners look to me to make quality decisions in everyone’s best interest.

I’ve written often about decision-making on this blog:

• It’s important to take time to think and not make snap judgments.
• You should surround yourself with diversity of thought to round-out your thinking.
• It’s appropriate to revisit decisions you’ve made and consider changing your mind.
• To avoid group-think, you should consult experts and stakeholders iteratively in one-on-one discussions, then decide.
• Finally, today’s leaders need to be data-driven. I’ve written about that here and here.

Now that we’ve covered several ways to make decisions, I’d like to add a new dimension, inspired by Olaf.

In the future, I’ll be smarter

With the benefit of hindsight, I can say with certainty that I am smarter now than I was previously. I have more experience and have learned many lessons. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that my future self will be better positioned to make quality decisions than my present self.

Olaf believes that age will automatically bring clarity. It’s not that simple. Ultimately, I don’t believe we need more grey hairs. Most of us are indeed old enough to lead, yet for many decisions, we can often benefit from a little more time.

Buying time

When we are faced with a decision to make, we feel the pressure to make that decision as quickly as possible. Sometimes that is necessary, but often it is not.

While you will never have all of the information you need to make a perfect decision, thoughtfully utilized time will render more available insight.

This isn’t procrastination. Simply putting off a decision because it is hard is not responsible. In contrast, you can deliberately defer a decision, then capitalize on the interval to make yourself smarter.

Your action plan

When you are faced with an important decision, you usually start immediately thinking and collaborating to reach a judgement. Before you dive in you should first ascertain and negotiate how much time you have to reach a decision. It could be minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years.

Once you’ve identified how much time you have, then you can devise a strategy to make yourself as smart as you can be on that particular issue by the time the decision needs to be made.

If you’ve made the bold choice to buy yourself adequate time to make a decision, then you deserve to belt out the final line of Olaf’s quirky song, as loud as you possibly can:

‘Cause when you’re older, absolutely everything makes sense!!

If you like learning leadership lessons from animated movies, check out this article I wrote inspired by A Bug’s Life.

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