Sometimes, people struggle to make a choice because they feel they need the last few bits of information to make the best decision.
The trouble comes from the fact that the last few bits of data are the most difficult (and costly) to get, if available at all. So people looking to make a perfect or near perfect choice often fail or fall behind where those satisfied with a good decision make the choice and move on. Where competitive pressures exist, good always trumps perfect because perfect never appears. Companies, and you know if you work for one, that get entangled and entrapped by obsessive-compulsive analysis, committee reviews, and passive-aggressive delay fall behind the times. Initially the time lag might be simply weeks or months. But if the decision-making culture in a business has a legacy of slowness, the time-lag can stretch into years, and you feel like you work in some sort of corporate time-machine back in the 1970’s or 80’s.
There is a great reference from the book Against the Gods - The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein. He tells of a note passed to him by a friend at an investment conference:
“The information you have is not the information you want.
The information you want is not the information you need.
The information you need is not the information you can obtain.
The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.”
This seems particularly apt in the current area of climate change. I’m sure you have your own examples from your work or home. Tell everyone your story by leaving a comment.
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April 6th, 2007
Ever sit through a training session and find your mind drifting to last weekend’s fishing trip or tomorrow’s day off? Of course. Who hasn’t.
The fact is that we adults learn differently from when we were much younger. Problems arise when the “trainer” and the “program” do not take this into consideration. The result: a group of adults who mostly decide that the session was “interesting” (read a waste of time). They decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Hence the speed of the decision was high, but the direction was away from the intended goal of the program. Low Decision Velocity.
Here’s a good article to read for anyone considering a presentation on any topic to a group of adults.
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April 6th, 2007
From Speed and Direction comes Velocity. Where are you headed and at what speed? What’s your personal velocity? What about your organization’s velocity? Heading in the right direction and at the right speed? Or perhaps wandering about.
In either case, the collective decisions we make, individuals and organizations alike, drive what I call “Decision Velocity”. How quickly we choose and decide determines our speed of progress towards our goals and to get to that endpoint we need to plot the direction.
“Speed + Direction + Decisions = Decision Velocity”
What’s your DV? Your org’s, your team’s? Do you know? Wouldn’t you like to know if you don’t. Wouldn’t you like to influence it more than you do now? Do you work in an organization that makes lots of decisions but gets nowhere fast? Or perhaps knows where it wants to go but can’t get a decision made to move even the smallest rock forward?
What do you think?
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April 6th, 2007
