Don’t Delay an Obvious Decision
The right answer sometimes stares us in the face.
We know how things are going to unfold and what we should do about it. But execution can be uncomfortable, messy, or difficult. Perhaps, all three. So, we delay the inevitable, waiting for a better time to pull the trigger. We frequently regret that decision later, often wishing we had acted earlier.
Problems don’t age well. And they rarely go away. Delay doesn’t always make them worse, but it does rob leaders of opportunities to move forward.
Here are a few statements we rarely, if ever, hear:
“I should have waited longer to terminate that team member.”
“The change we just made would have benefited from delay.”
“Holding up the new strategy was a great call.”
“We should have dragged our feet before solving that problem.”
Major decisions are complex and involve many moving parts and implications. Keeping your options open makes the most sense. But sometimes the answer is painfully clear. Or we know with great clarity how things will turn out.
In those cases, making the choice now is the best course of action. Waiting for the ideal moment or for matters to develop more fully sounds like the judicious option, but not when the answer is obvious or highly predictable.
At such moments, deciding not to act usually makes the outcome less desirable. If it’s the right call, the time to make it is NOW.
Problems don’t pause for red lights. They continue to advance until they are solved. Taking your time to think things through and act prudently should be the default course of action.
But when the answer is as clear as daylight, any delay prevents progress. Postponing the obvious choice can also allow a small problem to grow into a big problem.
When you know how it’s going to turn out, get to the solution as quickly as you can.
You won’t regret it later.
Every decision we make can be looked at with improvement with 20/20 hindsight. We make decisions based on the information we have at the time and what guides us in making "wise" decisions learned over time. Personally, I have learned it is better to spend more time in contemplation and discussion over major decisions rather than making snap judgements that often lead to mistakes. Better to be persistent and constant than expeditious in most cases. The session sounds interesting ...
In my experience, many teams are quick to put suboptimal solutions in place or work arounds to cover up problems. They say they are too busy to stop, identify the root cause and then attempt to fix it for good. Instead, they continue to do their work around until it becomes business as usual and they forget there is a real problem laying underneath festering. What I’ve found is it is less about making the decision to do something and more about lacking the skills necessary to fix the problem for good.