How Do You Make Fast and Good Decisions?

I keep wondering over and over what is the value of our decisions. Speaking with other CEOs some mention the fact that they need to make many decisions in a day to just make progress. Which is extremely important time wise.

Making decisions is something that I don’t like and I feel this is a quality one should develop to make good decisions in a short time. . So what you do when you need to make a decision? (And hopefully the right one…)

Gather more info on the matter – Key thing is finding out the info you are missing.

When you would skip this stage? In two conditions:

a. When the time costs will be too large b. When the mistake cost will be pretty small if you made a mistake.

I’ll give an example.

I had to print new business cards at the same time we made some changes on our website (AppinChina.co) . One of the changes we made was changing of fonts at the top. This also required changing the fonts on the card design.

Side note: This is also a good opportunity to announce we re-done the AppInChina.co website. It’s more user friendly, has more info and…yes. You can still find one of us on the chat to speak with (Usually me…) 

The problem is that changing this on the card might look weird on print. So I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I realized, we are talking about a business card which costs $8 to print.  These $8 are my mistake cost and not worth the time reconsidering how to make the card. The worst case would be that we will print them again.

Also, things don’t need to be perfect they need to be good enough. The next step is improving those…

This is just a little example but means a lot. Obviously, the more we go over to strategic matters instead of tactic matters the cost of mistake rises and more info needed to be gathered to make the right decision.

And still sometime you have no choice. Sometimes you can’t really get the info you need because it’s not available and you need to rely on predictions most of the time useless. Sometimes getting the info itself is too expensive.

So the art here is to balance all these factors to make the right decisions fast. In order to get to that balance we also need to recognize the fact that we will make mistakes and that it’s ok. Making mistakes is part of the process and improving all the time is the more important thing we need to pay attention to. Keep learning!

Now over to you

How good are you in making decisions? How do you get better at it? I’m curious to know how you personally asses these kind of thing. Share it in the comments.

As read on Startupnoodle.