There comes a time in many meetings where someone says something of the form
“Let’s do some homework on this and have a follow up meeting to make a decision”.
In almost all cases, this is a bad idea and you should just make the decision right there.
There are usually several surface-level reasons to push the decision
a) The right stakeholders are not in the room or not have been checked in on
b) You think you are missing key data or clarity needed to make a decision
c) You might be unhappy with the options presented.
What each of these misses is that the momentum of making a decision is far more important and if any of the cases above is true, you can almost always unwind the decision soon after. If a key person is not in the room, they can be consulted async after. If some key data needs to be found, there is almost always time after the decision to incorporate it.
I started adopting this rule when I started to run large organizations and I quickly found a couple of things
- The speed of decision making compounds and improves the clock rate of the organization
- I can’t think of a single example of when we have regretted or needed to overturn a decision. In almost every case, people knew what the call needed to be and were using as an excuse to hide some other organizational unease.