Time’s Up!
You need to make a critical decision. When do you have "enough" information? When have you thought about it "enough?"
Marketing maven Seth Godin addresses this issue wisely and succinctly as follows:
"First rule of decision making: More time does not create better decisions.
In fact, it usually decreases the quality of the decision.
More information may help. More time without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.
Deciding now frees up your most valuable asset, time, so you can go work on something else. What happens if, starting today, you make every decision as soon as you have a reasonable amount of data?"
He’s right on the money. In fact, I’d argue that one of the most valuable of all executive skills is knowing when "time’s up" and the decision must be made.
There’s some law of diminishing returns in the quest for more and more information on which to base a decision. Think of it on a graph as an classic bell curve, where the vertical axis is Quality and the horizontal axis is Time Pondering … the quality of the decision indeed improves for awhile, as the most important information is acquired and options assessed. But then quality begins to sharply fall off.
For fundraising executives, managers and creatives, the issue at hand could be a relatively straightforward one, like picking a print ad or a copy version. Or it could be more complicated, like apportioning budget between the proven and the experimental, between acquisition and donor development, or between direct mail and online.
Employees who can say "time’s up" — without obsessing, make a prudent decision — consistently, and move on to the next one — confidently … are special.
They’re the ones who deserve a raise!
Tom
One response to “Time’s Up!”
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Tom,
What you (and Seth) say about decision-making is mostly true. Like deciding whether to marry the man/woman you’ve been dating for two years. You are not going to make a better decision by investing another year in the decision-making process. However, a lot more decisions have a significant left-brained, almost aesthetic, component. Like whether to buy that sport coat or whether to include a photo of a client in the solicitation package. These decisions need to sift awhile as they make their way to the consciously-felt level. You know when you leave a movie if you liked it or not, but you don’t know till the next morning, or even the day after that, if it affected you at a deeper level. So, I would say that decision-making is a little more complicated than this piece indicates, as most decisions need to factor in the lag time that I have described above.
Curt