The downside of indecision

A few weeks ago I blogged about paralysis by analysis. More recently, two types of downsides of indecision have been brought into focus for me.

The first is falling behind your competition on progress and on information.

I was catching up with a colleague last week and we were discussing lessons learned by making mistakes.

One mistake he vowed to always avoid is not making a decision. His lessons came from working in a software sales organization for many years.

His point was, “I’ll make a decision, and it might be wrong, but then I’ll learn something by experience with certainty, and make another decision, and another, and eventually get it right. In the mean time, the guy who’s still thinking about it will end up seven decisions behind me, and will have that much less knowledge.”

This is actually a key point of Agile software development, specifically of focusing on working software over comprehensive documentation. Instead of analyzing indefinitely and documenting the details of specs, just build something, and learn from it, and move forward based on that.

Expansion stage software companies in particular should take this lesson to heart. Being fast and nimble is a big advantage for them, and indecision can stop them dead in their tracks.

This applies whether you’re deciding on a content marketing strategy, an e-mail marketing campaign, or selecting a target segment as part of your product management process.  

The second point is allowing a current bad situation to get much worse.

Imagine you’re in a situation where you’re losing to your competitor on lots of sales cycles, and they’re taking the market by storm.

You have five possible approaches to improve your win ratio and regain momentum… and you can only do one of them.

But which one?

The longer you consider the five approaches, and the longer you take to make a decision, the farther you fall behind your competitor, the more momentum they gain the market, the harder it will be for you to overtake them.

A bad situation is getting worse. Inaction has its price!