Fog of war
The term "fog of war" is sometimes credited to military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and everybody playing strategy computer games is probably familiar with limitations to what information is available, for example the map might be black for undiscovered territories. Unlike games with perfect transparent sharing of information (eg: chess) in real life your information is limited to a fraction of the all information existing about what is happening. For business decision makers this is important to understand in order to be effective.
The very basic restrictions in modern businesses are:
The very basic restrictions in modern businesses are:
- Limited bandwidth to process the information you have, most decision makers will not even be able to process all of their emails.
- Limited organisational maturity to transfer information, leading to disconnects in large organisations and bad decisions.
- Limited effort to discover and learn more about the current state of the business and its context.
- Limited capabilities to turn information into actions, often there are more blockers than enablers of good decisions.
The success of any business is dependent on the ability efficiently and effectively perform all the above activities.
The limited bandwidth of any business decision maker today coupled with the need to make decisions at ever higher pace means that relevant information is frequently not used. This becomes a trade off between making a fast enough decision, while it is still relevant. This also means that very early in a decision process there is a need to consider the importance of a decision and invest the right amount of resources into getting the needed information to make it.
Frequently you hear stories about how business make bad decisions that multiple persons in the organisation knew where bad. While it is common to second guess decisions and criticize them based on information that wasn't available at the decision time it is also common that vital information available to the workers isn't transferred successfully to the management taking decisions. To some extent this is caused by poor internal knowledge transfer, what is obvious to the persons working hands-on with something is hard to understand or totally unknown to managers a few steps up in the hierarchy. This is simply the nature of how information is discovered and learned, at the edges of where the business operates, managers are rarely the first one to know, they depend on being informed. Having an organisation that handles this well is critical, and should be formalized rather than trusted to word of mouth or informal channels.
In order to be informed all persons within a business needs to actively gather and find relevant information. This includes everything from reading the news to hanging out with a wide group of colleagues and listen in on what others are working and struggling with. Sharing what information you have transparently is important to help others but to be clear, the main responsibility is on decision makers to keep informed, not on others to inform and share information (mostly because you can't possibly know what others want or need to know).
With lack of shared information comes many different points of view on choices simply because the basic analysis is done with different information. This makes decision making harder and slower since all these gaps of information often needs to be bridged by sharing and convincing others that decisions are good. Typically in a business all your stakeholders, your managers and your co-workers have less information about the decisions you need to make, unless you are empowered to make decisions this can quickly become a mountain of effort to overcome. This also means that you should empower your teams heavily and trusting that even if you don't understand the rationale behind their decisions they are made with better information than you have. If you are hesitating on distributing decision making your core problem might be information sharing, overcome this and you might feel more comfortable with the decisions you see others make.
Knowing all of the above complications when making decisions, a critical aspect when your trade-off between enough information and time to make a decision is under stress, is to choose robust options. If an option is robust and is still effective even if some details in your information is wrong or missing then this option should be given a much higher preference than options that are fragile and depend highly on context to be effective.
Frequently you hear stories about how business make bad decisions that multiple persons in the organisation knew where bad. While it is common to second guess decisions and criticize them based on information that wasn't available at the decision time it is also common that vital information available to the workers isn't transferred successfully to the management taking decisions. To some extent this is caused by poor internal knowledge transfer, what is obvious to the persons working hands-on with something is hard to understand or totally unknown to managers a few steps up in the hierarchy. This is simply the nature of how information is discovered and learned, at the edges of where the business operates, managers are rarely the first one to know, they depend on being informed. Having an organisation that handles this well is critical, and should be formalized rather than trusted to word of mouth or informal channels.
In order to be informed all persons within a business needs to actively gather and find relevant information. This includes everything from reading the news to hanging out with a wide group of colleagues and listen in on what others are working and struggling with. Sharing what information you have transparently is important to help others but to be clear, the main responsibility is on decision makers to keep informed, not on others to inform and share information (mostly because you can't possibly know what others want or need to know).
With lack of shared information comes many different points of view on choices simply because the basic analysis is done with different information. This makes decision making harder and slower since all these gaps of information often needs to be bridged by sharing and convincing others that decisions are good. Typically in a business all your stakeholders, your managers and your co-workers have less information about the decisions you need to make, unless you are empowered to make decisions this can quickly become a mountain of effort to overcome. This also means that you should empower your teams heavily and trusting that even if you don't understand the rationale behind their decisions they are made with better information than you have. If you are hesitating on distributing decision making your core problem might be information sharing, overcome this and you might feel more comfortable with the decisions you see others make.
Knowing all of the above complications when making decisions, a critical aspect when your trade-off between enough information and time to make a decision is under stress, is to choose robust options. If an option is robust and is still effective even if some details in your information is wrong or missing then this option should be given a much higher preference than options that are fragile and depend highly on context to be effective.
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