You can’t steer a parked car.
Sometimes people can get stuck waiting for the perfect decision. They’ll want more data, more certainty, a guarantee.
Here’s the thing: Being decisive doesn’t mean always being right. It means being in motion.
You can make a decision today and adjust next week, or you can spend three weeks analyzing and still come up short. Speed plus correction beats delay.
I’ll take a 70% decision made fast with a willingness to adjust over a 90% one that never comes. Because while you’re still thinking, the world is moving on. Your market is shifting. Your window’s closing.
Perfect is the enemy of progress.
The perfect information trap
The biggest lie in leadership is that you need all the information before you can make a good decision.
You’ll never have all the information. Ever. There will always be one more report to read, one more stakeholder to consult, one more scenario to analyze.
Here’s what happens when you keep waiting for perfect information:
- Your competitors make moves while you’re still planning
- Market conditions change, making your analysis outdated
- Your team loses momentum waiting for direction
- Opportunities disappear while you’re gathering data
- The decision becomes harder, not easier, with more information
The perfect information trap isn’t about being thorough. It’s about avoiding the responsibility of making a call with incomplete data.
But that’s exactly what leadership is: making decisions with incomplete information and taking responsibility for the outcomes.
Why speed plus correction beats delay
Most leaders get this backwards. They think the goal is to make the right decision the first time. But that’s not how successful leadership works.
The 70% decision rule
If you have 70% of the information you think you need, make the decision.
Not 50%. Not 90%. Seventy percent.
At 50%, you’re gambling. At 90%, you’ve waited too long and missed the opportunity.
Seventy percent gives you enough data to make an informed choice while preserving your ability to act quickly.
The key is building correction into your process from the start. Don’t make a decision and hope it’s perfect. Make a decision and plan to adjust it as you learn more.
The compound cost of indecision
Every day you don’t make a decision is a decision itself. You’re deciding to maintain the status quo.
But the status quo has costs. It’s costing you market share while competitors move. It’s costing you team morale while people wait for direction. It’s costing you opportunities that won’t wait for your analysis to be complete.
Indecision compounds. The longer you wait, the more expensive the eventual decision becomes.
A fast decision with minor course corrections almost always costs less than a delayed decision, even if the delayed decision is technically “better.”
How to make faster leadership decisions
Stop treating every decision like it’s life or death. Most business decisions are reversible or adjustable. Here’s how to speed up your decision-making process.
Set decision deadlines
Before you start analyzing, decide when you’ll decide.
“We’ll make this call by Friday at 3 PM.” “I’m deciding on this hire by end of week.” “We’re picking our Q2 strategy by the 15th.”
Put it on your calendar. Treat it like a meeting. When the deadline hits, make the call with whatever information you have.
Deadlines force you to focus on the information that actually matters instead of endlessly researching edge cases.
Most decisions improve with time constraints, not unlimited time.
Define “good enough” criteria upfront
Before you start gathering information, write down what constitutes a good enough decision.
What are the key factors that matter? What data points will actually influence your choice? What are you trying to optimize for?
Having clear criteria prevents you from falling into analysis paralysis. Once you hit your “good enough” threshold, stop analyzing and start acting.
- Revenue impact: Will this move the needle by X%?
- Resource requirements: Can we execute this with current team/budget?
- Risk tolerance: What’s the worst-case scenario, and can we handle it?
- Timeline: Does this fit our strategic timeline?
- Reversibility: Can we undo this if it doesn’t work?
Five questions. If you can answer them confidently, you probably have enough information to decide.
When speed matters most
Not every decision requires the same urgency. Some decisions benefit from speed, others require more deliberation. Here’s how to tell the difference.
Reversible vs. irreversible decisions
Jeff Bezos has a great way of thinking about this in his 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders: “Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible — one-way doors — and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.”
But most decisions, he argues, are two-way doors. You can walk through, see how it works, and walk back if needed.
The problem? Most leaders treat two-way door decisions like one-way doors. They spend weeks analyzing decisions they could test and adjust in real time.
Hiring someone? Two-way door. You can always part ways if it doesn’t work out.
Selling your company? One-way door. Much harder to reverse.
Launching a new feature? Two-way door. You can iterate or remove it.
Choosing your company’s core technology platform? Closer to one-way door. Switching later is expensive and disruptive.
Choose your decision speed based on which type of door you’re walking through, not how important the decision feels.
Market timing and windows
Some opportunities have expiration dates. Market windows. Competitive advantages. Customer needs.
When there’s a time-sensitive element, speed trumps perfection every time.
Better to capture 70% of a time-limited opportunity than miss it entirely while planning for 100%.
The market doesn’t care about your analysis timeline. It moves on its own schedule.
Building decisive momentum
Decisive leadership is contagious. When you make decisions quickly and adjust as needed, your team learns to do the same.
Create a culture where speed is valued over perfection. Where course correction is expected, not seen as failure. Where moving forward with incomplete information is the norm, not the exception.
Start with smaller decisions. Practice the 70% rule on low-stakes choices. Build your team’s confidence in fast decision-making before applying it to bigger opportunities.
Celebrate fast failures. When someone makes a quick decision that doesn’t work out, focus on what you learned and how quickly you caught it, not on the fact that it didn’t work.
The goal isn’t to be right all the time. The goal is to be moving all the time, learning as you go, and adjusting faster than your competition.
Make the call. Put it in motion. Adjust as you go.
Because you can’t steer a parked car, and standing still is the riskiest decision of all.
