Business Decision Making

If you have ever played a sport like soccer, basketball, or hockey, you know that you can’t just shoot at-will. You need information in order to decide whether or not it’s a good idea to take the shot. At the same time though, you can’t wait around forever to take the shot either.

In sports, some of that information you need is obtained during the game. For example, if one of the defensemen fell and left you with a wide open path to the goal you may decide to take the shot. Or, if you see that one of your teammates is wide open on the other side of the field, you may opt to pass instead of taking the shot.

Other information you might use comes before the game. You might research the other team and find out that the goalie’s left side is their weak side. If you’re on their left during the game, it might be advantageous to take the shot. Or, you may know that the other team’s defenseman on the other side of the field is new to the team and might be playing out of position. In that case, it may be better for your teammate to take the shot.

In the military, we would get similar information. During a mission, we might have stumbled across some key intelligence about the enemy. That’s like the game time information I wrote about earlier. That information could determine whether or not we would continue the mission, or adjust what we’re doing on the fly. Similar to the pre-game information, the higher ranking Generals, etc. likely have lots of intelligence about the enemy. They know their strengths and weaknesses, which helps identify the strategy they’ll use when they fight against them.

Business Decision Making

Have you ever felt like you just didn’t have enough information to make a decision? Sure, when you first start a business you won’t have customer feedback or that sort of information, but as you gain momentum, you will have at least some of that information. Maybe you don’t have thousands of responses to the survey you sent out about new product features. So what?

Use the handful of responses you did get and make a decision off of that. Use the feedback you do have to make a decision on what product features you will introduce next.

The responses you get may lead you in a direction that makes your product appealing to a whole new customer base.

Or, it could be a total flop.

Honestly, you won’t know until you try it. I wish I had a better answer than that.

However, once you know whether or not the decision you made was a good decision, you’ll have a brand new piece of information available to you.

Was it a good decision? Great, do more of that – whatever it is.
Was it a bad decision? Well, that sucks. Now you know not to do that or things like it again.

If you wait until you have perfect information, you’ll never make a decision. No new information is perfect. It’s just better than what you had before.

Have you ever played a sport like soccer, hockey, or basketball? Even if you haven’t played the sport you’re probably familiar with how it’s played and how the players have to make decisions during the game. In those sports you can’t just take shot at the goal at will. You need that information that I was talking about to make a decision on whether or not to shoot. But if you wait in those games, if you wait for the perfect opportunity, you may never get the chance to take the shot. Another defender might come and steal the ball or time might run out in the game. So you can’t just sit around waiting for the perfect opportunity to take that shot. In order to decide whether or not to take a shot during the game you need some information. Some of that information comes during the game. For example, if you’re playing soccer and the goalie trips, it might be a perfect opportunity for you to take the shot, on an open net essentially. Or you might look across the field and you might see a teammate who’s in a better position to score. And so it might be a better idea for you to pass the ball to that teammate so that they can take the shot and score. Other information that you might have comes before the game. You might do some research on the team that you’re playing, you might want to find out what are their strengths and weaknesses? Is it the goalie, a seasoned veteran or is he a rookie, things like that, so you might want to learn a little bit about the team before you start actually playing against them. So, two categories: game time information and then pre-game information that you have, and all that information comes together to help you make that decision as to whether or not to take the shot. In the military, every soldier from the lowest ranking private all the way up to the highest ranking general has the ability to influence decisions in one way or another. Like a private for example, if he finds a key piece of intelligence while they’re out on a mission, it may help him and his leaders make a decision right away. So that’s kind of like that game time information that we’re talking about. If they find a piece of information that says, hey, the bad guy is not here, the bad guy is over in the next town over, well that’s something that they can act on right away and they can move to that next town, they can go figure out where that bad guy is for example. Generals and the higher ranking folks in the military, they tend to use that type of information but also they do a lot of pre-game information. They collect intelligence on the opponent that they’re going up against, so they know what their strengths and weaknesses are. So that’s kind of like that pre-game, learning about the other team that you’re playing against in soccer, hockey or whatever. So it’s like that pre-game stuff. And when the soldiers make a decision, it’s important that they make that decision quickly, just like when you’re playing the sport, you don’t want to sit around and pass the ball all day long, waiting for that perfect opportunity to take a shot, because time might run out, or the opposing team might take the ball and score, you know, take the ball away from you and score. So it’s important in the military for the same reasons to make those decisions quickly. It may not be a perfect decision though. It may actually be the wrong decision, right, just like you may make a decision to take the shot because all the factors lead you towards, this is a good opportunity to take that shot in whatever the sport might be. In the military they may decide to take one course of action based on all the intelligence that they had available to them at that time. Now, they may get it wrong, and they may do the wrong thing in that situation. And it sounds counterintuitive but that’s okay. What happens though is that they get a new piece of intelligence, they get a new piece of information that says, okay, what you just did was bad, it was wrong, it was the wrong decision to make, so don’t do that again. And so now they can go back to the drawing board and make a new plan, make new decisions based on all of that new information that they have in addition to all that previous information that they had. So then they can go and they can make better decisions going forward. Now, apply that to your business. How often do we sit there and get that analysis paralysis where we’re sitting there, and we’re like, if I just had one more month’s worth of data I can better understand who my customers are. Or if I just had that one more piece of information I can better design this product based on customer feedback and things like that. Make the decisions based on the information that you have today, right now. Because you’ll get that information eventually, but sitting around and waiting on it may not be the right thing to do. Now maybe it is, maybe you do need that one more month or two more months in order to get that perfect set of information, and if that’s the case it may make sense to wait. But, if you find yourself waiting that two months and then you’re thinking yourself, you know what, I need another month or two on this. Now you’re pushing into a longer stretch of time and now you’re just using that as an excuse to not make a decision. So, make decisions fast and learn from the mistakes that you made in prior decisions and use that to move forward.