- Next-Step Thinking for Uncertain Situations
- Reducing Uncertainty and Ambiguity
- Working Through Uncertainty and What's Next
- What Not to Do: The Brute-Force Path
- Summary
- Workshop
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What Not to Do: The Brute-Force Path
The most difficult circumstances often lead to the most brash decisions. Sometimes these decisions are exactly what an organization needs to avoid analysis paralysis. But consider the example of a national wholesaler faced with several different “next best steps.” Instead of working through these and prioritizing them with her experienced team using Bullseye Prioritization or Affinity Clustering, or gaining some level of consensus through exercises such as “What, So What, Now What?” or Buy a Feature, a fairly new mid-level executive decided the fate of the company unilaterally. She decided that the path through personal uncertainty and broader companywide and industry ambiguity was to charge ahead in a brute-force kind of “get out of the way and follow me” manner.
The executive believed in making decisions quickly but did so without the benefit of others’ hard-earned experiences, expertise, and insight. She took her team down a brute-force path hoping that the journey would lift the fog and clear away the uncertainty. Instead, she lost her key leaders and six months later found herself explaining her strategy in an exit interview. “Just Do It” might be great for advertising slogans, but it is rarely the right approach when the next step is shrouded in uncertainty.