Last Thursday at our Q1’23 all-hands check-in, I discussed “decisioning”. This is the first memo of two focusing on decisioning and how we can make decisions quicker to drive faster innovation.
The word “Urgency” is thrown around a lot at every startup. It's easy for all of us to say the word, but hard to understand the underlying meaning and how to take actions resulting in “urgency”.
When I say “urgency”, I mean making decisions with commitment and taking corresponding actions faster.
Time is our most valuable asset. We spend our time like currency. When we waste time, we waste our limited currency because we are taking much much longer than we should to capture the immense opportunity in front of us.
Every decision no matter how big or small spends our time when not made, committed, or communicated:
For every meeting in which we discuss a ton of stuff, but don’t make an actual go-forward decision, we waste time → We wait until after the meeting to make a decision. Sometimes days or weeks.
For every decision that isn't committed by each person involved, we create more conversations → We have more meetings to create commitment.
For every decision made without clear ownership, we haven't truly made a decision → We run off in different directions or don't implement the decision at all.
For every decision not clearly discussed with each stakeholder, then we don't have an action plan → No accountability means individuals won't prioritize the decision above others.
Wasted time compounds. For every decision not made in a meeting, committed to by the stakeholders, or communicated effectively, we waste time. Perhaps an hour, a day, or week is wasted. Each wasted hour, day or week, puts off the next decision… Then that decision takes extra time to effectuate, which impacts the next decision in line… The domino effect compounds into wasted weeks and months and not hours or days.
Bezos, one of the foremost decision framework practitioners, is guided by a focus on decision velocity to drive innovation, at the expense of consensus and even if it increases the risk of mistakes.
“I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins,” he wrote in a 2015 shareholder letter. “To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
"You have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions," Bezos wrote. "It’s easy for startups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too. "
We all have a common desire to get more data, but there is an obvious problem with that approach. "If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow," Bezos wrote in his 2016 letter to shareholders.
Instead, you must make a best-effort analysis, decide, and continue learning after you decide.
There is no shame in course correcting by learning — its faster to do so then wait for 80 or 90% of information. "If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think," Bezos wrote. "Whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure."