I think it's a consequence of taking away individual judgement and becoming, it seems, terrified of letting a person make a decision, because sometimes they're bad at it, or have biases, or whatever. Organizations are afraid of individuals deciding things, and individuals are eager to push their decisions onto a "process" or "policy" because if they actually make a decision and anything goes wrong—whether or not the decision was a good one given the information they had—they're toast, fired if they're lucky, publicly demonized and blackballed and fined and jailed if they're not. The individual cost of a decision that is bad—even if it's only bad in hindsight—is too often way out of proportion to the harm it caused, so why risk it?
I don't know why it's happening, but it sure explains a lot of things across much of US society. Politics, business, education, parenting. I wouldn't be surprised if it's part of what's behind the frightening US "cost disease" phenomenon from the Slate Star Codex post that was discussed here a few months back.
The key realisation for me was that it's nearly impossible to get perfect information to make a perfect decision, and the longer you chase the impossible, the quicker your competitors catch you. I try to place decisions in one of two categories:
* Expensive if it's wrong (hard to undo, might hurt a business relationship, costs a lot of cash to find out if it's right, etc.)
* Inexpensive if it's wrong
Expensive: requires more upfront rigour, so you don't make catastrophic mistakes (not that it's possible to get perfect information still); Inexpensive: just get on with it, and see if it's right. The vast majority of decisions are inexpensive ones, where team instinct should win out - you employ smart people, hopefully with a reasonable amount of experience, trust them and get on with it. This stops the analysis paralysis that some companies get into.
Fair point. Making these decisions correctly is hard. I'm pretty sure this is one of the things that you slowly learn how to do with experience, that no amount of being smart or research can make up for.
Indeed! Lack of decision making power can cripple a business. When everybody knows that any decision can be spontaneously vetoed, then people stop making decisions, and they also stop believing decisions.
And I think part of what cripples decision making is in fact the fear of opportunity cost, because every decision requires considering an infinite number of alternatives.
That sounds great, but hard decisions are hard because there isn't time, money, other resources to have all the facts, yet a decision must be made. There might not even be any way to know for sure without taking one path. Experience is all we have to guide us. Progress is full of such decisions, made in a gray fog. Fear of being wrong is paralyzing.
Working with limited information means making decisions that might turn out to be bad ones down the line. I agree with your statement, but the opportunity cost of figuring out the exact right problem to solve is inaction, and inaction is often worse than making a poorly-informed judgement.
Do you really follow this? It seems like someone following these rules would rarely be wrong, but that they'd be paralyzed by the cost of making decisions.
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