A business leader has to make hundreds or thousands of decisions every month depending upon the size and complexity of the business.
One may follow some robust decision-making processes to ensure that the best decisions are made.
But is it possible to make every decision a perfect one?
“Unlikely.” an experienced CEO avers.
“There are many decisions you have to make. You need a lot of information to make those decisions. It is simply not possible to have perfect information every time while making every decision. Sometimes, you may not have all the necessary information needed. Still, you have to make that decision based on whatever information is available, using your judgment. In those situations, you may need to take some risk. Some of those decisions may go wrong, but that can be known only retrospectively.
To aim for perfection in every decision means you may have to wait longer sometimes to get all the information. That may lead to paralysis in decision-making.
Timing is critical in decision-making. A right decision taken too late may turn out to be a wrong one, because the delay may cause unexpected or undesirable outcomes.
Of course, all decisions are not equal. Some decisions have more serious implications than others. Decisions must be made depending on the things at stake. But in general, it is still okay if you have to take a thousand decisions and 5-10% of them turn out to be wrong. You can’t achieve perfection in decision-making.
At a particular moment, a decision may be the best based on what we know then. It may be wrong afterwards when we know better or more. Not only in business, we all experience this in our decisions about our lives also. But we can’t read the future in the present moment. So, some degree of uncertainty will always remain and we have to live with it.”
Wise words. To be good decision-makers, we must remember this.
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