Working with Imperfect Information
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?
William Shakespeare, King Lear
At MicroAssist we are in the middle of a deep dive into the strategy for our learning group. I’ve learned that I over research, over think and look for the perfect answer. I think it’s the engineer in me In engineering school, especially in all those math classes, there was one right answer—I liked that! I hated the ambiguity of history, literature, art and especially the philosophy classes that Notre Dame forced me to take. Ironically, to succeed as an entrepreneur (and likely as a business leader) you have to learn to deal with imperfect information and ambiguity. I still struggle with that.
Harvard Business Review wrote an article Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy.
Strategy requires making choices about an uncertain future. It is not possible, no matter how much of the ocean you boil, to discover the one right answer. There isn’t one. In fact, even after the fact, there is no way to determine that one’s strategy choice was “right,” because there is no way to judge the relative quality of any path against all the paths not actually chosen. There are no double-blind experiments in strategy.
The best strategists aren’t intimidated or paralyzed by uncertainty and ambiguity; they are creative enough to imagine possibilities that may or may not actually exist and are willing to try a course of action knowing full well that it will have to be tweaked or even overhauled entirely as events unfold.
For our strategy discussions, I have realized that our learning group strategy is never going to be perfect—it is a living document. Over the last year we have continuously looked at, improve and worked with our strategy document . It has had the benefit of keeping the strategy fresh in everyone’s mind and making sure we use it in day to day decisions.
The quest for a perfect answer to a problem without one can be dangerously paralyzing. As I was thinking of this issue, one of my favorite websites Brain Pickings (check it out!) published a great article on author David Foster Wallace’s struggle between perfectionism and performance.
“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”
David Foster Wallace