It’s very easy to allow a decision to linger. You know all the reasons, more info, more data, more communication, more insight, more, more, more. Many decisions we leave open in hopes they will simply evaporate all by themselves, which is sort of a decision itself.
There is an interesting linguistic core to this “indecision-ness”. The core word of decide, cide or “cida”, is latin for kill. Homicide is to kill a human. Suicide is to kill yourself, etc. Decide is to kill all the other options that are in front of you and accept the one remaining.
Think about the last decision you made, maybe for breakfast. What one thing did you choose and therefore kill off all the other choices that you could have had for breakfast?
I would go a bit further in the business sense. Every decision not made today, kills the calendar another day. It leaves that decision, big or small, hanging around to do additional damage through added weight of existence.
500 or 1000? This layout or that layout? These colors or those colors? Call back today or tomorrow? Whatever the decision is, if you’re not waiting for a specific piece of already identified further information and know when you will have it, MAKE THE DECISION now. You can generally recover from poor decisions. Likely the margin of “bad-ness” in your decision is marginal anyway. The only way to get better at making decisions is to……………make LOTS of decisions.
In my years as a sports referee (basketball, soccer, baseball and volleyball), the amount of time allowed to make a decision was in the moment. Those years of virtually spontaneous decision making proved invaluable for me in now being able to make all kinds of decisions thoughtfully and quickly. Read the rule book (be prepared with the info you need), then get out of the way and make the decision. It’s not hard. But, the game that is your business can’t go on if the decisions aren’t made. Imagine the fan uproar at the sports event when the whistle blows and the referee signals that he wants to “think about it”.
Where is your business not going forward because you aren’t making a decision? Then decide to start deciding!!
Now that I’ve talked to business owners, I realize just how important my perspectives on defining the other person’s point of view in advance actually is.
ReadOver the the past year, I largely wrote about change and disruption. I even had a blog about change in March, Pre-Pandemic. Change and disruption are inextricably linked which generally creates resistance to change because it creates disruption. Most people do not seek disruption. It is less predictable than status quo.This past year has been … Continue reading Change, Disruption and 2020 in Review
ReadWe talk so much about disruptive technologies and how positive they are. We rebuild after disaster disruptions, often for the better. What if we treated COVID-19 as a disruptive technology or disaster?
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