Take Action
when you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
A few years ago, I was working with a director named Jessie. Jessie sat on a decision about consolidating two internal services for six weeks. She wanted her staff engineer to model integration plans and failure scenarios and she wanted more time for stakeholder alignment. By the time she made a decision, a different team shipped a partial version of the same idea, and that version became the de facto plan.
Jessie wasn’t incompetent or lazy. She was one of the more thoughtful directors I’ve ever worked with. She was slow because moving felt riskier than waiting. Waiting doesn’t feel like a decision, in fact, waiting will often feel like due diligence. But every week she didn’t decide was a decision she made anyway - it was just easier to commit to waiting than it was to commit to action.
The Two Doors
Amazon’s leadership principles have an idea buried in them that I find more useful than I’d expect from the corporate branding around it. It says that some decisions are one-way doors, and some are two-way doors.
One-way doors are hard to reverse. You walk through, and coming back costs time, money, or trust. Those decisions deserve caution, a wider circle of input and deliberation.
Two-way doors are everything else. You can walk through, see how it feels, and walk back out if it’s wrong. Most decisions, even a lot of really big decisions, are two-way doors. Jessie’s service consolidation was reversible. Worst case, she’d have learned something and adjusted course, but she treated it like it would define her review (or career).
All leaders (me especially) make wrong decisions, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The mistake a lot of leaders make is applying one-way-door caution to two-way-door decisions - and doing it again and again until the org’s default speed is “s l o w.”
Deciding to Wait
I wrote several months ago about trust breaking down when teams comply without believing in the plan. This same break down shows up upstream of that, in how comfortable people feel moving without asking permission first.
A team that’s been burned for acting without enough sign-off learns their lesson quickly. They start asking for more approvals, more data, and more meetings, until they get to a point where asking more questions and delaying is safer than owning the outcome. They think they’re being cautious, but the reality is that their system has taught them that inaction is safe, and action is not.
If our teams default to waiting, we can’t assume they’re being careful. Take a look at what happened the last time someone made a decision without perfect information and it didn’t go well. The answer to this question is probably the real reason for the slowdown.
Ego Is the Bottleneck
I also wrote recently about what happens when leaders can’t admit they’re wrong, and it’s the other half of this. Bias for action only works if being wrong quickly is cheaper than being right slowly.
If every small misstep gets replayed in a postmortem looking for someone to blame, people will optimize for never being the one who moved quickly. Jessie wasn’t afraid of being wrong in the abstract. She was afraid of being wrong in a way people would remember.
Leaders who want more bias for action from their teams have to demonstrate, repeatedly and specifically, that a fast wrong call costs much less than a slow right one.
The One Second Rule
The same idea showed up when I wrote about the second between getting poked and reacting, the pause that keeps you from getting defensive when someone challenges you. This idea may sound like it’s conflicting with “act faster,” but it’s not.
The pause in that article is about your reaction to being challenged. It protects the relationship and the trust in the room. Bias for action is about your posture toward the actual decision before anyone’s challenged anything. You can have both. Definitely take the second before you defend yourself. And definitely do not take six weeks before you walk through a door you could just as easily walk back out of.
In Practice
A few things I’ve seen work, borrowed from people much smarter than me on this:
Colin Powell has a great quote on this topic that I think more people should follow.
Generally you should act somewhere between P40 and P70, as I call it. Sometime after you have obtained 40 percent of all the information you are liable to get, start thinking in terms of making a decision. When you have about 70 percent of all the information, you probably ought to decide, because you may lose an opportunity in losing time.
I also like David Marquet’s “I intend to” language from Turn the Ship Around!. He (and I) believe(s) that decisions should be made by whoever is closest to the problem, turning “can I do this” into “here’s what I’m about to do.” This approach increases velocity, and also gives people the autonomy they need to engage more fully in their work.
Before your next decision stalls out, ask whether it’s actually a one-way door. Most of the time, it isn’t, and that question is probably enough to get people moving.
If you’d like to think through that together, I’d love to talk more.