When Does It Pay To Delay Decision-Making?

Quite often, quick decision-making is associated with brilliance but blind adherence to this practice is akin to the moth's attraction to a night light as it soon goes blind in the dazzling glow or perhaps dies burnt or exhausted in its persistent quest to marry the light.

Many times decisions taken in haste land us in trouble. The Swahili saying, "cheza kama wewe", loosely translates to "play it like you", is used when urging people to keep things within their limitations or act with caution. Urgent circumstances around us push us to handle our problems at speeds faster than our minds can process them and produce sound solutions. Despite this, a decision is always better than none at all. It is better to make mistakes and learn from them than to pupate in a state of indecision.

The surgeon acts with speed to solve a problem under great urgency. But he is trained for it. Dexterity comes with practice but many people only observe decision-makers giving direction and determining tough situations and adopt the practices without appreciating the mental processes at the back end that support these monumental decisions.

In our world, competition, jealousy, and pride force decisions our way and we must never fall for the traps brought on us by others hell-bent on benefiting from our mistakes. All the confusion that comes with it must be dealt with systematically. Let us appreciate the time element in decision-making so that we can answer the headline question.

President Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the USA, devised the time management matrix that has four windows. The important-and-urgent window is where you place things to be done immediately. These are things that cannot be dropped. The decision here could include delegating stuff for quicker handling.

There's a window for the urgent-but-not-important stuff. This is where trivial matters are bundled together. These are time wasters that should be left out as they take a lot of time. A decision to keep trivialities active causes one to drop the ball as it diverts your attention from handling the most critical things. Gossip is always urgent but in the end, certainly not important.

The not-urgent-and-not-important window consumes the time of the majority of people. Sometimes, a clever chap gets people to mark time by making them busy with unimportant stuff. If you find yourself in such a holding area, flee. Make that quick decision if you are not getting a solution from your contact.

Eisenhower felt that the not-urgent -but-important window, is where the big picture people must occupy. These are the long-term things that need great planning before moving them to the urgent-and-important window. People who spend more time in this quadrant often manage things well. This quadrant tells us that we must not rush our planning for we must consider all angles before releasing them for execution. It, therefore, pays to delay decision-making on the biggies so that we end up executing well-thought-out plans. The smallies must be addressed from where they belong.

It is also important to delay decision-making when out of depth. We worsen things when we resort to trial and error.