Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Saturday, October 08, 2005Slow Down to Make Effective Decisions Faster
Many an entrepreneur and business executive have drawn inspiration from the metaphor of business as war:
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
George S. Patton
In some ways, the metaphor is apt. As the informational content of products and services increase, so does industry clockspeed. As clockspeed increases, ambiguity increases, and the amount of time available to make a decision diminishes. As a consequence, it's getting tougher to make good decisions fast enough in the "fog of business":
A common response is to create an environment of perpetual crisis, which tends to justify the centralization of decision making for the sake of efficiency. But as is implied by the previous quote of General Patton, speed is not enough. Sufficiency requires good and fast.
In a recent article, Michael Roberto of Harvard University, asserts "leaders must 'decide how to decide' as they confront complex and ambiguous situations, rather than fixating solely on the intellectual challenge of finding the optimal solution to the organization's perplexing problems." [1] Furthermore, he offers some suggestions to how one may answer the question of "how does one achieve 'diversity in counsel, unity in command'?":
It's a good article, from which I glean the following hypotheses:
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Speedy decisions are often contingent upon the use of tacit mental models in which may be imbedded key assumptions that may not be relevant or correct. As Roberto writes, "Deeply held assumptions about customers, markets and competition can become so ingrained in people than an entire industry goes on blindly accepting conventional wisdom." Consequently, quick decisions may make one feel good, but could lead to disasterous results in a rapidly changing environment.
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Good decisions need to be based on validated assumptions. That is, they need to be subjected to disconfirming evidence. To do that expeditiously requires diverse views, rigorous conversation and debate, and a respect for truth over rank, standing, or deemed expertise.
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Friction is inevitable in such an environment, and the active cultivation of trust among collaborators is more robust than attempts to control. (See Hagel and Brown.)
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The decision making process must be viewed as iterative, complete with rigorous, patient debriefs in order to accelerate learning.
In short, taking a bit more time in order to pay attention to the context and process in which decisions are made can accelerate the making of more effective decisions over time.
[1] Thanks to CPH127 for making me aware of Roberto's article, "Why making the decisions the right way is more important than making the right decisions."
