The word ‘decision’ means to cut away. De-cision. To remove what needs removing and keep what you need. If you don’t take responsibility for closing a door and sacrificing something, you never make a decision.
Steve Jobs was on the brink of launching the next model of Apple II when he attended a trade fair and saw a photocopier with a display of what you were going to print. His mind was blown.
In the car on the way back he announced that he was scrapping the new model Apple – they were going to make the home computer version of the screen he had just seen. Cut away the money spent on the new Apple; we are doing this now. And so, the Macintosh was born.
On the other hand, I have seen companies stultify as they can’t cut away even as much as last year’s marketing budget when it failed. They chase their sunk cost and throw good money after bad doing the same thing as last year, not willing to let anything go that they have already paid good money for, nor stick their neck out on a new idea that might not work.
A client asked for advice on an event he was organising. One item I suggested was flyers to hand out. He said they had 6,000 flyers. Oh good! Let me see them. I was taken to a storage room and shown three dusty boxes sealed with tape. “So how many did you order” I asked. 6000 he said!, then seeing my puzzlement went on to say they weren’t sure if had the right info, but won’t order more until they were used up!
Sometimes that lack of decision is due to social dynamics; if there is any reason why the idea is precious, say if the idea came from the boss himself, you don’t dare challenge it no matter the results.
Similarly, if the recommendation of a particular course of action comes from a highly paid consultant, they are probably wrong but you’ll never win an argument with their spreadsheet and trained justifications of bad ideas.
Because it is impossible to predict human behaviour, as we are so irrational and the market so complex, all we can really do it to try an idea and see if it works. It likely won’t (as new ideas rarely do) but if that experiment was cheap, then you can make a decision to cut it out when it fails, and try something else.
By doing this, you will have created a two-way door. You don’t change the company in any permanent way, you don’t bet the farm, you test, stop, see the results, then abandon or proceed accordingly. You try out each idea to see if it will work, then cut it away when it does not, having learned something in the process of trial and error about your customers.
By doing this, you might even have a partial win and refine that idea into something brilliant, or maybe by accident you might hit upon an absolutely market-changing insight, and lead the market into lucrative groundbreaking territory.
This all starts with someone in the company being happy to take responsibility, and make a decision of what to keep, and what to cut away.
