Winning Before You Decide

I've written previously on the utility of fast decision-making. This should not be confused with running into situations as a headless chicken without a plan. It was Sun Tzu who said that "the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won". Speed and preparation are not opposites. Speed without preparation is just recklessness with confidence.

Good preperation and contingecy planning is a prerequisite for successful missions. There will be fog of war - you will not have transparency into all information. But repeated success poses its own danger: teams that have been winning for a while tend to get comfortable, deprioritize planning, and assume the next situation will resolve itself the way the last one did. It is every leader's responsibility to fight that creeping complacency (also known as the "disease of vicotry"), in others and in themselves. The flip side is also true: meticulous step-by-step planning becomes its own trap when it paralyzesrather than enables.

Building options before needing them

It is always better to have more options than few, even if it often makes your decision subjectively harder to make. But the worst decisions arise as a result of forced decisions,when you have let the walls close in and are no longer choosing freely but reacting under constraint.

This means doing the positioning work long before the decision arrives. In practice, at a corporate level, this looks like building a network of relationships you can draw on when a problem surfaces and not scrambling for allies after the fact. I have seen this play out repeatedly: the people who move fastest and most effectively in organizations are rarely the ones who are smartest in the room. They are the ones who spent years building trust with the right people, and can now open doors that others have to knock on repeatedly.

Positional advantages are accumulated in drops and leveraged in buckets. The investment is slow, invisible, and easy to deprioritize. The return is disproportionately high.

Don't unnecessarily close off your options

The notorious conquistador Hernán Cortès famously burned his ships after landing in Veracruz, Mexico to forcefully create a point of no return for himself and his men. As a piece of psychological commitment it is a fascinating story. As a general operating principle it is a unwise one.

Unnecessarily committing to a path when there is no pressure to do so goes against
everything that makes good decision-making possible. You want to stay agile. When something isn't working, you want to pivot quickly, not struggle forward with self-inflicted constraints.

Some common bridge burning I have observed:

• Burning bridges with people out of spite or frustration. There is rarely a good reason to leave scorched earth — not when leaving a job, not when a project falls apart, not when you're rejected for something you wanted.
• Making time commitments without pressure to do so. Suggesting a deadline you can't be certain you'll meet is setting yourself up to fail and eroding trust in the process.

The world is more malleable than most people assume. From a well-prepared position, pursued with genuine energy, problems that seemed fixed have a way of opening up. That only works if you haven't already closed the doors behind you.