The only bad decision is one made without all the data present.
That puts business owners in a pretty tough situation. As their organizations grow in size, they become fantastically complicated. They can become such a dense cluster of processes and systems that they feel opaque.
So what happens when they plan?
They can’t achieve their goals because they didn’t thoroughly investigate all of the interlocking pieces of their own business. They get stopped by some constraint they didn’t think of. They get frustrated and stuck.
It’s not a result of incompetence. The fact is, deconstructing a beast as complicated as a business isn’t easy.
But if you do it once, and you assemble an inventory, you now have something to build off of. You’re not going to get it perfect the first time, so accept that fact and look at it as the first step. Keep adding and changing it as you go.
Like everything, it’s all about the incremental progress. And once you start making plans built on real data, your goals will suddenly seem much more achievable.
Simple idea: make better decisions by collecting more data.
