Make better decisions.
Michael Useem shows you how in “Great Escapes: Nine decision-making pitfalls — and nine simple devices to beat them.” I just stumbled across this article from a couple of years back while cleaning out some files. It’s worth reading — if, you know, you ever have to make decisions in your job. Samples:
Problem: Analysis paralysis
… If you have 70% of the information, have done 70% of the analysis, and feel 70% confident, then move. The logic is simple: A less than ideal action, swiftly executed, stands a chance of success, whereas no action stands no chance. The worst decision is to make no decision at all….
Problem: Sunk-cost syndrome
… It’s always painful to destroy something we’ve built, whether it’s a machine, an organization, an idea, or even a paragraph. Our investment is both psychic and economic. But the cliché holds: no pain, no gain. “My advice to young men,” Henry Ford wrote in the 1920s, “is to be ready to revise any system, scrap any methods, abandon any theory if the success of the job demands it.”…
Some of the tough situations we’ve been talking about lately — e.g. those at Merrill Lynch or Alcatel-Lucent — would benefit from better awareness of these pitfalls and a tighter focus on making solid (not perfect!) decisions much, much sooner rather than even slightly later.
Category: Management, The working life1 Comment so far
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Good reminders about two common pitfalls in decision-making. In many organizations, one of the biggest challenges in problem analysis and choosing a solution is the reliability of the information being used in the decision. When assumptions and inferences are presented as fact or when the personal meanings we attach to the data become as valid as the data (Peter Senge’s Reflective Loop), our decision process is headed for derailment.
Corporate decisions take a quantum leap forward when we don’t allow someone to package a guess as the truth or act from an assumption in the absence of anything better.