"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

I recently relocated to San Francisco for a 6 month sabbatical and it has been a very interesting, even enlightening, experience.  The cliché’s about San Francisco aside (the spectacular food, the great parks, the fog rolling in, the cold summers, the hills….all absolutely true), a move is quite interesting in that it makes you relearn things that you could previously do without thinking.  When you move from a small place like Durham to a big place like San Francisco this is doubly true.  And during this relearning process I have been reminded of how problematic indecision can be.  Let me explain.

When you move to a new city and you need to do simple things like get to the grocery store, find a gym, get your dry cleaning done, etc. it is very easy to let the unknown dictate your actions.  That is, you keep waiting for a “just right” circumstance to emerge rather than simply trying something.  I have seen this dozens of time in research labs that I have managed and in all types of new project teams too.  There are other ways to think about this; the most common being that it is a “too much thinking and not enough doing” mentality.  You are frozen in time because there is no clear path and this ambiguity causes you to have a delayed action.  When you finally start just trying things, you find it is not nearly as difficult as you expected but you spent so much time worrying about it that you are behind anyway.  Also, there is a “time value of time” that makes this much worse than the direct or immediate impact (i.e., a waste of time is like a snowball and builds on itself because you become behind in all of the things that were dependent on the first decision; the one that you did not make in a timely manner!).

So as Nike coined, “just do it”!  In fact, Nike coined this catchy manifestation but the concept has been around for longer than any of us – experiment, experiment, experiment.  Learning by doing.  Perhaps we could say “just try it”.  In the area of innovation, 3M was a pioneer in the concept of just trying it, without expecting perfection (and remember, perfection is the enemy of completion).  You expect to stumble when you are always moving forward.  If you are not stumbling a bit, then you must not be moving enough!

So how does this relate to your career?   Too often I have seen employees in new projects or new jobs take the safe “sit at my desk and wait for directives” approach and then when a directive comes, there approach is “think about the directive until I have what appears to be the perfect solution.”  Unfortunately, your colleague is out trying three different solutions while you are thinking about one and they are learning three times as much as you are during this same period.  And they have chosen the solutions with intelligent, educated guesses (even though they did not have all theinformation that wanted) so they make more progress at the same time!

Of course there is judgment and balance in this as well as a heavy dose of corporate culture.  The cliché “You don’t have time to do it right but you always have time to do it over” is the opposite extreme of acting without enough thinking.  You need to be self-aware to know if you are an over-doer or an over-thinker but in my experience, most of us lean too much towards the overthinking, indecisive side of things; especially early in our career and in a new job.  There is a generic curve I like to think of that can be called the Quality of the Solution vs. Time to Obtain the Solution and it is not even close to linear! (Quality of Solution vs Time to Solution Graph) It starts with a steep linear sloop but then tapers off quickly and then slowly approaches perfection but never gets there. You want to work in the knee of this curve and recognize when indecision or a desire for perfection is taking you into the long plateau.

So in summary, keep a close eye on yourself and your new employees to ensure that indecision, a lack of a clear path forward, a discomfort of the unknown, a fear of failure, etc. is not creating an unnecessary delay in action. Just try something!  If you don’t, the decision to be indecisive can cause a tremendous inefficiency and will likely cause you to miss some opportunities for you and your organization.