“Life is a series of commas, not periods.” – Matthew McConaughey

I recently was fortunate enough to work with a small business that has been experiencing incredible growth.  As with all growth, it came with a number of challenges.  Those challenges have caused the business to have to come to terms with a number of decisions that need to be made.

Unfortunately, for all of its other strengths, this group struggles with decision-making.  They agonize over every option, make giant lists of pros and cons, and then still can’t decide.  More often than not, enough time passes that their decisions end up being made for them.

The reality is that those two preceding paragraphs could’ve been written about thousands of organizations around the world.  Teams of really smart people who work really hard and are really passionate about what they do get stuck when they’re making a decision and then can’t get unstuck.

One of the explanations I hear from groups that struggle with decision-making is that they “don’t want to make a mistake”.  I understand that.  Nobody in a leadership role wants to make the wrong choice.

What those groups tend to forget is that almost no decisions are required to be permanent.  People try to make the perfect choice so that everything goes perfectly.  The reality is that there is almost never a perfect choice, and if things go imperfectly enough, you simply choose something else.

I understand that there are certain bad choices that can be hard to recover from, but the reality is that there are fewer of those than we think.  For the most part, we choose, we act, and if it doesn’t go the way we like, we have the opportunity to choose again.

Certainly there are other underlying reasons why teams struggle to make decisions (lack of the correct geniuses, for one).  But the idea that once we choose we’re basically stuck for life keeps coming up again and again.

Think about yourself and your team.  Are there decisions and choices that need to be made but nobody’s making them?  Move forward.  Make a decision.  Choose your path.

If you don’t like how it turns out, you’ll have the chance to choose something else.  The only way to be permanently stuck is to choose nothing.