Analysis Paralysis

Many people believe by putting off making a decision they can avoid the outcome of the needed decision and things will just somehow go on without any consequences.

Here is the real truth: making no decision is a decision. Hard as you may try to avoid the decision making process – it will happen. You can take control and make the decision you wish, or let things happen and hope for the best, which still ultimately turns out to be your decision. Go for the first option – to take control and make a decision.

We need to “fail forward” in our decision making process. To fail forward, you must create many decisions each incrementally improving your business. It proves that success by failure can truly work.
People get overwhelmed with choices and become afraid of the risk of making a decision. Psychologists call this choice overload. In the presence of an abundance of information or too many choices, people often become overwhelmed and frozen. Those individuals inevitably revert to what is easiest, effectively making no decision at all. That can be dangerous in business and in life.

Far too many people choose not to choose, allowing decisions to made for them. They go through life trying to avoid risk, and that often means avoiding decisions. As a general rule, “losses loom larger than gains” and that is what causes people to regret bad decisions and reflexively avoid them altogether. Part of the fun in what we accomplish is learning, exploring, and trying new things. You just can’t do that without making decisions.

Decisions will always be a key differentiator among business leaders. Those who are willing to step up and make the difficult decisions with confidence and assurance will either sink or swim, but it will be their choice that leads to the result. Analysis paralysis is a disease we cannot tolerate in small business today. We have to make decisions, take risks, and drive our company, failing forward as we go.

We can’t afford to wait until everything is always exactly the way we want it to be. We have to take decisive action and make things happen, realizing that there will be necessary course corrections along the way. But it is far easier to change the direction of a moving object than one that has not moved at all. Don’t get stuck where you are in your business because you can’t make a decision. If you wait until you have everything exactly as you want it to be, you’ll still be sitting there while someone else moves past you over and over again.