“Imperfect action stops incessant overthinking.” – Jake Thompson
It seems like an oversimplification to say that many leaders suffer from paralysis of analysis, but just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s not true. Leaders everywhere routinely fail to make decisions or take action because they can’t stop thinking.
Obviously, you shouldn’t make decisions or take action without thinking at all. The best decisions are part data, part intuition, part educated guess, all combined with a bunch of thinking. Measure (think) twice so you only need to cut once. But at some point, you have to stop measuring and start cutting.
Unfortunately, this is where a lot of leaders struggle. Lots of leaders have great tools and templates and spreadsheets and graphs and whatever else to help inform their decision making. All of those things are great, in their place. Eventually, though, you have to take whatever those things give you and do something with it.
I think a lot of leaders are so afraid to make a mistake that they decide, at least subconsciously, that it’s better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing. That’s almost always false. We don’t want to make decisions or take actions that wreck our organizations, but rarely is that the case. Far more often, we wreck our organizations by not making decisions or taking action.
Think about your organization. Over the course of its lifetime, how many decisions or actions have caused complete devastation? The fact that your organization still exists would seem to say zero. That doesn’t mean everything has always been perfect, or that there was never any self-inflicted pain, but there’s always been recovery.
Now think about the flip side. How many issues or challenges or opportunities went unaddressed? What was the impact of those failures? It’s hard to measure, for sure. But based on everything I’ve seen for the last 25 years, far more is lost through inaction than through the wrong actions.
What are you currently not acting on? And what’s your excuse? Are you still ‘gathering data’ or ‘considering all angles’ or ‘evaluating options’? Is that what you’re doing? Or are you just paralyzed by data and fear? Stop overthinking and get to work.
