Most of your decisions are wrong. The power law suggests that as many as 80% of them have little impact on your business, career or other goals. Only 20% of them make a difference.
The trouble is most of us don't like admitting our decisions are wrong or inconsequential. There's a perceived loss of status in having to admit we've changed our minds. Or that we bet on the wrong horse and things didn't turn out quite as we foresaw. But this way of thinking is wrong too. Our minds are not inflexible with decisions carved in stone. We can change our minds if we want. In fact, changing our mind is one of the easiest things we can do. Changing reality is far harder but will never happen until you change your mind first.
Equally no-one looks down on someone who changes tack. The world is a complex ecosystem which is inherently chaotic and unknowable. We all have a mental map which we believe will navigate us through but we must never forget the map is not the territory. Things will go wrong - it's how you react which is important.
Once you realize that most of the decisions you make will be wrong or irrelevant, then you can adapt the way you make decisions to compensate. It's better to make fast decisions than to procrastinate. The person who makes ten decisions in a day, will have two correct and meaningful ones. The rest won't matter. They'll out-compete the person who makes just a single decision each day and has to get a home-run each time.
If you know that many of your decisions are going to be wrong, then the feedback loop becomes more important. It's fine to make a wrong call, as long as you discover that quickly, adjust and change course. In acting on your decision, you get feedback data which helps you improve your decision-making. Sometimes you'll ace it, most of the time you'll need to correct. The faster you can get the feedback and adjust, long-term the better your performance will be.
The problem for people looking in from the outside is that this can appear as chaotic, or even inconsistent. Rapid adjustment and flexibility which is the result of fast feedback and many logical decisions, can be disorienting for those not involved in the process. It just looks like wavering. So the third discipline that the power law of decision making forces upon us is communication. It's important to explain why things are being changed when decisions are amended. Share the new data that you discovered and the implications. This will help the team to follow the journey with you, rather than being on the receiving end of conflicting directions.
If most of your decisions are wrong, then make them faster, find out which ones aren't working, adapt and explain why you are changing. Then you'll accelerate the speed of the entire team and exponentially increase your chances of success.
