Act rather than wait. Risk failure.
🏃🏻♂️ DECISION CAPITAL: Leading through acting promptly, crisply and confidently, and making adjustments along the way
It is essential to be able to make good decisions promptly, crisply and confidently.
Even if you could be wrong. Leaders decide anyway. Better to act than wait.
Besides, you can always adjust while you're on the move. But for right now, the greatest source of leverage you have is your ability to decide.
No more vacillation. No more optimization. No more debating to the point of paralysis. No more exhausting all of your available options and seeking out all possible information.
Doing so only means the time and effort to determine potential upsides and downsides of your decision will be disproportionate to the impact of the decision.
This issue enrages me. Indecision makes me want to choke people. Particularly coworkers.
Years ago, my marketing team was tasked with finding a vendor to redesign our agency's website. Nothing exorbitant or complicated. We weren't trying to win any awards, just build the necessary web pages to show who we were, what kind of work we did, what our clients said about us, who was on our team, and how you could get in touch with us. Pretty straightforward.
Truth is, anything would have been better than our original site, which was cheap, outdated, and didn't reflected our brand.
Anyway, here's an accounting of what happened during our team's absurd decision making process. Think about how you would react if this was your company.
First, we had a kickoff meeting to get aligned on the strategy.
Then we had a follow up meeting to talk about that meeting.
Next, I reached out to about a dozen potential vendors.
My partner and I did eight video calls to evaluate them and get their proposals.
We then regrouped internally for our supposed final meeting to select the best vendor option.
But our team leader wasn't satisfied with our evaluation criteria, so she tasked us with starting all over and finding additional candidates who were more in line with her taste.
Okay then.
We contacted some additional vendors and did four more video calls. Then we remade our presentation of findings, hoping to finally wrap up the decision.
Which didn't happen.
Instead, our boss pared our list down to her top three, as she wanted to jump on one more video call with each one so she could try to bring them down on price.
After those calls, we had one more meeting, finally picked a vendor, and agreed on a start date. Over two months later. It took five people over eight weeks to make one decision. And the designers hadn't even moved a single goddamn pixel yet.
Please tell me that someone else sees the inefficiency and absurdity of this process.
Indeed, this what happens when teams are driven by fear. People try to maximize instead of satisfy, overthinking every situation where a decision is required, always hoping to optimize a little more what is already working good enough.
It's unproductive and stressful and a waste of time and money.
To my earlier point, leverage comes from the ability to decide. And yet, many people believe that just because having some choice is good, means that having more choice is better.
It's not. At a certain point, there can't be anymore ruminating to satisfy the fears of actually taking action.
Leaders decide. If you or your team is still dragging ass on a decision that should have been made months or years ago, here's my recommendation.
Trust your instincts. You don't need to discuss this with others, and it doesn't need to be the best decision ever.
Act rather than wait. Risk failure.
People tend to gravitate toward people who make decisions promptly, crisply and confidently.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What is your favorite way to procrastinate?