Operate like an imperfect springbok

Two ideas about the importance of moving at speed (weirdly, by two smart bald men):

“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” Jeff Bezos

And:

“Certainty is another word for stalling.” Seth Godin

Strategists often say client organisations are too slow, but i wonder if sometimes we’re too slow too. Not because we’re bad at our jobs, but because we want to be certain before we put something forward.

The problem with being certain, though, is that you might be right and late to getting the organisation to do something. The reality is that most of the time you can’t afford to get to 90% information without having some diminishing returns in the process.

One of which, as i’ve experienced first hand, is team morale, because there’s a lot of talking and not a lot of doing, which erodes people’s drive. But generally speaking, imperfect springboks offer greater competitive advantage than perfect sloths.

We glorify giving something 100%, but sometimes 70% is enough to get signals from the market about whether it works. And then, we do it all over again.