Deliberate Action
By: Philip Brittan
Tags: Mindfulness, Risk, Learning, Business, Agility

Deliberate Action

Image by Michelle Raponi from Pixabay

In business, as in many things in life, we want and need both to do things correctly and move fast. To do these seemingly opposing things requires an appropriate balance between thoughtful analysis and decisive action.

Analysis is critical. There is a saying in the US Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”, meaning that when you need to move quickly, don’t rush. Take your time to do it right and then move on. You can’t hit a target if you don’t take time to aim. And having to do things again and again — because you are not doing them right — is not fast, no matter how quickly you are moving or how much energy you are expending.

It is all too easy for any of us to get up a full head of steam and start plowing through stuff quickly at the moment-by-moment level, but still end up not getting very far overall, because we are rushing, having to stop, rethink, redo, clean up, etc. At the end of the day, what actually matters is how quickly we are moving overall, not how busy we are moment-to-moment.

But, too much analysis becomes counter-productive. It keeps us from moving ahead with diminishing returns for our continued investigation. A common reason that we can fall into “analysis paralysis” and plan forever without actually taking any action is a fear of making the wrong decision. That fear is directly related to perceived consequences of getting it wrong. I would be absolutely paralyzed by fear at the thought of walking on a tightrope 100 feet above the ground. But I will gladly walk on one that is only 1 foot above the ground (and have frequently done so, since I own a slackline :)). The action is exactly the same in both cases, the but the consequences of failure are dramatically different.

The key to reducing the fear of failure and thus the risk of ‘analysis paralysis’ is to reduce the consequences of failure. And that is the heart of the Agile method. Agility at its heart is all about risk management. It’s about reducing risk so that you can move ahead quickly. The Agile method reduces risk by breaking work into very small chunks, executing one chunk at a time, testing, making sure that chunk is correct, learning, and moving onto the next piece, leveraging what you learned, and not being afraid to back up and do a chunk again if you find you went down the wrong path. Since work is implemented in small chunks and tested frequently, the wasted effort of a wrong decision is minimized. It has been shown that implementing things in small batches is more efficient than big batches.

This approach mirrors the Scientific Method: look at the facts, form a hypothesis, run an experiment, gather data, analyze the data, and adjust your hypothesis to fit your new observations and analysis. This is at the heart of what it means to be a learning organization: do something, measure results, analyze, learn, institutionalize new learnings into your process going forward, repeat.

I have worked with people who circle problems again and again, rather than solving those problems. It is the fear of being wrong that causes the endless circling. My suggestion is to walk around the problem once, look at it from all angles, but only once, then make a decision and dive in. Manage overall risk by keeping each step small, measure and collect feedback, objectively analyze the data, learn, and move on. If you make a mistake, just fix it, immediately. There is another aphorism I like: When in doubt, do something. If the evidence doesn’t lay out a clear path, just pick a path, try it out, and see what you learn. The act of doing will generate new evidence you can use.

There is also an element of practice makes perfect here. By breaking work up into small pieces and measuring/learning after each piece, we are effectively practicing to become better. I could never walk to the other end of the slack line without falling off if I don’t try again again, falling off many times in the process, until I develop the skill to stay on.

So keep moving ahead, but make sure you take time, with each move, to really consider what you are doing, do it carefully and excellently, so you don’t have to do it again, or worse, deal with damage control resulting from a poorly executed project. When you move smoothly, you get to put projects behind you confidently and move onto the next. I believe this practice of thoughtful consideration should be baked into how we operate. We take reasonable time to plan before we act, but we also consider continuously, as we act, to make sure we are doing the right thing all the time. A habit of thinking while acting also allows us to avoid that ‘analysis paralysis’. I think of this as moving at a ‘deliberate’ pace: not hesitating, not rushing, being continuously thoughtful and moving the ball forward.

I read years ago that the ultimate goal of Bushido, the Zen path of the warrior, is for thought and action to become one. It is in essence a practice of continuous mindful execution.