Your Decision Problem Is Actually a Planning Problem

**Mickey Anderson** (0:17)
I was on a call last week with a group of business owners, and a really important question was asked. What's costing your business more?
Not making decisions? Wrong decisions? Or delayed decisions? And almost unanimously, everyone said delayed decisions. I found it fascinating. Almost every one of them was dealing with similar types of decisions, so AI tool selection, CRM choices, headcount decisions. Do I hire somebody or do I try a contractor? I see the same trend from small businesses and solo printers all the way through large enterprises, where we call it due diligence. But ultimately, what we've done is set ourselves up for failure in our decision-making process. This is one of the most common mistakes I see across the board, this is the type of organization. And in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to show you why it's the most expensive problem that you've got in your business right now. And I'm going to teach you a simple shift to make stronger decisions faster that are right. Get out of that nonstop, never-ending due diligence mode, which is productivity theater, really, and make better calls that drive your business forward through the next decade.
Let's dig in. So I want to talk briefly about a specific example of this that I think will help you understand the real problem behind these delayed decisions. I was talking to a friend who has been trying to determine which CRM to change to for about six months. He has a duct tape solution right now. He's got a whole bunch of different tools using zaps and integrations to make things move, and then trying to add AI. And it's really become this convoluted mess that's costing probably 5 to 10x more than it needs to. And he has spent the past six months researching the different CRM systems, features. He's gone to demos. He's done it all, and he still can't make a decision. And he's stuck. And when I asked him why, it was really simple. He said, look, even if I choose and make the right call, I don't know how to get started. I don't have time for this. And that's where it became so clear. I have seen this in large organizations, too. There was a company that we were working with recently where the CEO was really considering some restructuring, layering in agentic into specific functions within the organization, which would mean some contraction in headcount and some functions, and then potentially some expansion in others. And it was a big decision, and they were looking at the different agentic tools, they were looking at the different service providers to support all the different roles, and just trying to decide, do we proceed, do we not proceed, when do we make this call? And when I asked them what was getting them stuck, it was the same response as the CRM. It was, you know what, even if we make the call, we're gonna be scrambling for the next six to 12 months to figure out how to make it work, to roll this out, to build the plan, and to get moving. And that's when I realized that this is so much more common of a problem than I originally thought. What's happening here is we've somehow decided to separate decision making from planning.
We assume that once I've made the call, I've made the decision, then I build the plan. That is so backwards because you can't make a great decision without understanding what it would look like to implement, what the next three, six, 12 months looks like. And you can't understand that without actually doing some planning.
And this is a massive cost because what ends up happening is you make a call and then you wait or delay, or you haven't really taken the time to plan. You extend the timeline because you haven't done the planning up front. And it just cascades down into chaos and you end up scrambling and looking back thinking it was a wrong decision when in reality, it was a process issue. Let me break this down for you.
The decision will become obvious once you're looking at not just the decision itself, but the alternative plans side by side to understand not just whether this is the right tool, but is this the right time? Is this the right function? Is this the right XYZ? Do we have the resources, the capital? Those are the things that end up impacting a decision, but we don't have a structured process for looking at that for each of our options. We end up making the wrong call and wasting a ton of time.
So this isn't something I just made up either. My husband, Kyle, we teach this framework that she's brought in from Tier 1 Special Operations. We call it War Games, and it's a facilitated planning process that we work companies through. So let me walk you through the key components here that you need to look at. So the first step is identifying what is the objective of the problem. We need to have complete and total clarity and alignment on what are we solving for? What is the actual problem? Because otherwise, you're going to get a bunch of people with different solutions to different problems, or trying to achieve different things, and they're going to be moving in different directions. So what is the problem that we have that we're trying to solve for? Not what's the best tool. What's the problem we have now with the tool we have that we need to solve for? That is the better question.