Unequivocably… maybe

Well so much for the promise to myself to post once a week. It has been a week with absolutely no time to set aside to write.  This is no doubt due in some part to a general inability to focus and get things done.  Perhaps if I can get  two posts this week it will make me feel better.  I have committed to myself to work fewer nights and weekends which should be a positive step.

I remember reading an article in the Harvard Business Review many years back that was an analysis of what made businesses succeed or fail.  There were about 1700 businesses involved in a Harvard study that spanned ten years.  The firms were followed from inception and ran the gamut from wildly successful to dismal failures with everything in between.  Sizes ranged from single proprietorships to firms with hundreds of employees.  The goal of the study was to see if there were identifiable trends in the management of the successful companies as well as those not so.  They identified something akin to the top ten reasons for success and failure.  All of the other nine reasons in both categories paled in comparison to the first in both lists:  The doomed companies failed to make decisions and the most successful made clear decisions regularly.  Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the healthy firms made many bad decisions, but when it became apparent they were going the wrong direction, they stopped what they were doing, analyzed the new information, and then made new decisions.

I liken it to being lost in the wilderness.  You are pretty sure that the trail to your left will lead you out of your predicament so you commit to your decision and trundle off to the left. After some time you begin to notice nothing has looked familiar and you realize you have made a mistake. If you keep going on that trail, you are going to get further and further from your intended destination.  So, now is the time to make a new decision – which could be an incorrect one as well. After enough decisions however, you will have collected a lot of information about what the wrong directions are.  At some point you will arrive at the correct decision and find your way back out.

This is where I sometimes get hung up.  Whether it is that I am seeking the euphoria that comes with those moments of absolute clarity, or I am simply afraid to expose myself to the risk of a bad decision, I’ll get absorbed in the idea that I can’t afford to make a mistake.  This leaves me in the position of postponing decisions hoping to have better information soon.  So rather than trial and error (or trail and error in the above case) I feel I must have the right answer at the onset.  The bigger the decision, the more likely I am to get myself into this mindset. 

Far too often in my business life as well as personal life I postpone decisions while I seek clarity to the ultimate path I need to follow.  The reality is that I would almost always be better off making a decision with the information available and acting on it sooner.  If it turns out to be wrong, that should become evident at some point and I would then be closer to having the ultimate clarity I am seeking.  What I am beginning to realize is that more often than not, clarity comes in small pieces.  I do need to find clarity for each step on the way, but not necessarily the end-game.