“I took the canal zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also”
– Theodore Roosevelt
The world is not black and white. Neither are most business or technology decisions. One of the most difficult things in any company is understanding where the line between “too much” and “too little” debate lies in determining a course of action. Erring on either side is costly and damaging — timidity emboldens competitors and reduces opportunity; rashness wastes resources and introduces risk. But I’d wager that most people if asked what is the greater sin — a hasty decision or a delayed one — would say that haste was worse. That’s wrong: both are equally bad.
Every situation is different as well. If you have a flat tire on the highway, you don’t need a lot of data (nor do you have a lot of time) to decide what to do. In contrast, if you are weighing developing and launching a new product, more facts and time to evaluate them are important.
So if there’s no bright line, how do we know?
In addition to college and professional experience, I’ve also studied at that storied center of leadership development…Star Trek. That gives us a decision-making tool I like to call the Jean-Luc Picard Method:
- Get all the smart people in the room
- Provide an atmosphere where ideas and passion can thrive; but cynicism cannot
- Get all the options aired
- Encourage people to challenge those options
- Pick one and focus everyone on executing (debate ends here)
Data (information, not the android science officer) helps. But avoid the trap of analyzing and re-analyzing. One of the downsides to technology is that it makes it easier to get deeper and deeper into the data. Sometimes we take strange comfort in being able to confirm in multiple ways facts we already know. As Malcolm Gladwell has written, evolution has made us all pretty good at evaluating things based on partial information.
