“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”
- Neil Peart, Canadian lyricist and drummer
We’ve been successfully developing and launching new products for decades. A problem we see all too often is teams not finding the right balance between information-gathering and decision-making.
Some teams take unwarranted leaps with nowhere near enough relevant information, driven by real or imagined deadlines, thus inadvertently taking on huge risks.
Other teams become “stuck” – unable to make progress because they are (rightly) motivated to be very rigorous, but lose track of their schedule obligations; this is “analysis paralysis”, which also puts projects at risk.
We’ve developed the heuristic shown in this infographic based on our experience in automotive, aerospace, heavy vehicle, semiconductor, electronics, and other industries to help teams find the right balance between schedule pressure and rigor.
The key things to remember are:
• "Fail fast“: The wrong decision will drive learning, but you will learn nothing while waiting.
• Waiting for all the info necessary to be sure of a decision can create a bigger problem than just making a judgment, learning from mistakes, and then making adjustments as-needed.
• 60-70% of the desired info is usually enough to make a judgement and proceed. The bigger (more irreversible) the consequences of the decision, the more info you’ll want.
• Do not waste time re-visiting a decision unless new, relevant information becomes available.
• Verify: pay close attention to the results of the decision and adjust course if necessary.