Decide at Seventy Percent.

When I left the Navy, I expected business decisions to feel easier than combat decisions. In one sense they were. Nobody was shooting. In another sense they were harder, because the feedback was slower. In the air, you knew within minutes whether a decision was right. In a company, you might not know for a year.

Slow feedback creates a dangerous temptation. Leaders wait. They wait for more data, more consensus, more certainty. They tell themselves they are being prudent. Usually they are being afraid.

Jeff Bezos has written that most decisions should be made with somewhere around seventy percent of the information you wish you had. Wait for ninety percent and you are probably being slow. Military leaders have said versions of the same thing for generations. In combat, waiting for complete information is a decision too, and usually a bad one. By the time the picture is complete, the moment has passed.

Speed of correction buys speed of decision

The posture means you accept that you will sometimes be wrong, and you build your ability to notice and correct quickly. That is the loop. The faster you can observe the result of a decision and orient to it honestly, the earlier you can afford to decide. A team that learns within days that it was wrong can decide far sooner than a team that needs a quarter to find out.

Annie Duke, the poker champion turned decision strategist, gives this a name in How to Decide. She calls it the time-accuracy trade-off. Increasing accuracy costs time. Saving time costs accuracy. Her rule of thumb is simple: when the possible gain or loss is small, the decision is low impact and you can go fast.

That is why seventy percent pairs with the door test. Seventy percent is right for two-way doors, the decisions you can walk back through. One-way doors earn more time.

Practice the posture

1. Measure your correction timeFor each open decision, ask how soon you would know you were wrong. The shorter that window, the sooner you can decide.
2. Name what you are waiting forWrite the specific fact you still need. If you cannot name it, you are not gathering information. You are hesitating.
3. Separate prudence from fearAsk whether more data would change the decision or only make you feel better about it.
4. Check the doorMake every two-way door decision this week. Put real thinking time on the calendar for each one-way door.