The Value of Being Decisive
Being able to decide without all of the information you might wish for is a critical startup leadership skill. Often, a clear direction to move drives more value creation than taking time and resources to achieve an incrementally better decision.
Many people are paralyzed when faced with committing to a decision. Often those with technical or scientific backgrounds whose work is exacting will have developed habits of thoroughness in their work that serve them well in many circumstances. However, they can also feel very uncomfortable committing to a direction with less than 100% of the information and analysis needed to confirm that the direction is the optimum one. This tendency can manifest as various team members suggest incremental information-gathering to clarify minor information points and avoid committing to a path.
The kicker is that, in many cases, a team may over-invest in getting closer to the perfect information to make a given decision – and that can be very costly from a timeline and resources perspective. Someone needs to have the confidence to look at the decision that needs to be made, assess the adequacy of the totality of information available, and then make a call. A less-than-perfect decision made sooner can enable much faster and more efficient forward progress, which can spell the difference between success and failure when you are driving a sparsely resourced startup forward. And this is where the art of leadership comes into play.
For example, doing enough customer discovery to confirm your target customers’ critical dimensions and requirements for your product is essential. However, once you have a critical mass of input, someone needs to put a stake in the ground and decide what you will implement. What is the synthesis of all that input, and where will you land on any points where you got different perspectives? It is perilous to get the input of only a tiny handful of potential customers, but there is definitely a point of diminishing returns, so someone has to make the call. That someone also needs to be comfortable that sometimes they will be wrong and will have to be accountable for and deal with those consequences. This is the essence of leadership – gathering enough information, synthesizing it, and declaring a direction. Defining the product is one of those critical path decisions that cannot wait for perfect information. Once design decisions are made, they should be clearly and concisely documented so everyone can execute that plan.
Another example is when to call something complete enough to move to the next stage. There will always be one more test that could be run to confirm the evidence we have so far. At some point, as the saying goes, “you have to hog-tie the engineer and ship the product,” even if it has a few imperfections. Someone needs to decide if it will be worth it to make the product 1% better, or can we live with it the way it is? Now, such a decision is situation dependent. If that 1% makes a life or death difference, it may well be worth the time and resources invested in making the product that much more perfect. Yet, sometimes the drive for perfection gets out of hand. I remember talking to one data science team in Europe that was working on a medical device algorithm. Apparently, their algorithm was already performing in the 90s on sensitivity and specificity, yet the team was still working to squeeze out incremental gains. Wait, what? Is the difference between 95% and 96% sensitivity practically relevant in the messiness of the real world of medicine? Almost certainly not. They needed to finish the product and get it through the regulatory approval process rather than spend another six months of company burn rate to squeeze out performance gains that would not be practically meaningful to their customers.
Does that mean that once a decision is made that it can never change? No. But unless and until some important new information enters the picture which may require revisiting a decision and considering all of the implications of changing it, it is better to have a clear direction so that subsequent decisions can be made and the whole project can move forward. One of the most critical skills that I am forever honing as a startup CEO is learning how to assess when I have enough information to make a call – and then making it. At the end of the day, this is how you realize the agility value that startups potentially have as a competitive advantage.
