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Tuesday May 25, 2010

Topic: Decision Management

Reference: Sidhu, Inder. “How To Get Beyond False Choices”. HBR. Http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05ever_lose_sleep_over_a.html. May, 2010.

Tuesday May 25, 2010

Topic: Decision Management

Reference: Sidhu, Inder. “How To Get Beyond False Choices”. HBR. Http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05ever_lose_sleep_over_a.html. May, 2010.

The law of scarcity usually prevails in business. That is that you never have enough resources to do everything. In fact you are often challenged to do the things that are fundamentally required. That is why managers typically suffer from anxiety and anguish over making the right decisions. Let’s call it the decision trap. There is often an inherent fear of making a critical mistake, not selecting the right project or putting the wrong people in charge. As a result, organizations can suffer from analysis paralysis as managers attempt to get enough information to be sure that they make the right decision and avoid the trap of making a bad decision. No one wants to be the Decca Recording Company guy who had this to say about the Beatles, “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” Critical decision-making is seen as a critical competitive advantage. In the referenced article, the commentator has reframed the issue to think about it differently. Specifically, he sees the selection of one thing over another as a false choice. Instead he suggests that companies can benefit from doing more than one thing and distilling things down to an either or proposition. “This approach-taking on two seemingly opposing activities at once and leveraging each for the benefit of the other-runs counter to the lessons many of us learned in business school, like maintaining a maniacal single-minded focus…It provides a framework to speed decision-making, scale expertise, operate flexibly, and replicate successes.” This is a great concept if you can get past your resource restraints. If you can’t, you have to do a better job of getting more out of the projects that you put in the development closet. The key is to pilot different alternatives and to find a way to make sure that the best ideas see the light of day. This can help you avoid the anxiety of the decision trap within the confines of current operations. There are other ways to approach this issue as well. Let me know how you are managing your decision trap.