“We react to what’s in front of us, whether it truly matters or not.” Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review Blog.
Know what is most important, and keep that front and center at all times. Your success comes from being one step ahead of the competition and, at the same time, being prepared to react to changing circumstances. Well-informed and agile decisions are essential to your leadership and your team’s success. How do you split your time between two areas of your business that are not performing well? What should be the top priority for your scarce resource? Sophisticated software tools can help your brain get to a good conclusion faster.
If you have followed our previous suggestions, you’re ready. You’ve got the absolute best data available, in one central location, up-to-date, at a glance and flagged for action. You have all the inputs needed to make a decision. As you drill-down from your flagged dashboard, you start to see important information, color coded by priority. If multiple are high priority, this is where the brilliance of the human brain works best – we’ve automated everything we can to get you here. Now take your time to review the information at your fingertips, run scenarios of what consequences your potential actions could have. Now you can go with your gut, knowing that you have truly combined the science of decision making with the millennia of human experience and development that have created a machine beyond anything man-made.
After you’ve made a decision, it’s time to move forward. Stick to your decision. Consider how you’re going to implement it. Then go! The great thing about automation is that if you change the core, everything that sources from it updates as a result. And you can automatically send notifications out to anyone affected by your change. And remember, the next step in the OODA loop is to follow-through and measure the result. In our next article, we will examine cycling through the OODA Loop and improving from one decision to the next as new situations occur.
“Most leaders don’t get to pick the situations they lead in. They become known as leaders by how they lead in the situations they are in.” Chief Master Sgt. Jeff Howard
Up Next: Act
Act quickly and consistently with the right information in front of you.