Decisions Made In Haste Quotes

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

Am I making myself clear, Orrin? I don't regret how I've lived these past few years. I move where I will. I set no appointments. I guard no borders. What landbound king has the freedom of a ship's captain? The Sea of Brass provides. When I need haste, it gives me winds. When I need gold, it gives me galleons." Thieves prosper, thought Locke. The rich remember. He made his decision, and gripped the rail to avoid shaking. "Only gods-damned fools die for lines drawn on maps," said Zamira. "But nobody can draw lines around my ship. If they try, all I need to do to slip away is set more sail.

Decisions made in haste are repented at leisure.

The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn’t exactly the opposite of speed. In the first place it’s the extreme regularity of paces, a uniformity. Here one might almost say that a good walker glides, or perhaps that his legs rotate, describing circles. A bad walker may sometimes go fast, accelerate, then slow down. His movements are jerky, his legs form clumsy angles. His speed will be made of sudden accelerations, followed by heavy breathing. Large voluntary movements, a new decision every time the body is pushed or pulled, a red perspiring face. Slowness really is the opposite of haste.

The more you actively farm for dissent, and the more you encourage a culture of expressing disagreement openly, the better the decisions that will be made in your company.

Again and again, governments have made world-shaking decisions based upon misinformation. The fallibility of giant state information-gathering machines bewilders historians, and all nations have regularly suffered from its consequences. Every sensible national leader listens to their intelligence chiefs, but none make critical judgements solely on the basis of their claims.

Organizations are constructed a bit like computer programs. When a company is tightly coupled, big decisions get made by the big boss and pushed down to the departments, often creating interdependencies between the various areas of the business. If a problem occurs at the departmental level, it has to go back to the boss who oversees all of the departments. Meanwhile, in a loosely coupled company, an individual manager or employee is free to make decisions or solve problems, safe in the knowledge that the consequences will not ricochet through other departments.

If the leaders up and down your company have traditionally led with control, a tightly coupled system may have come about naturally. If you are managing a department (or a team within a department) in a tightly coupled system and you decide you’d like to begin to lead your people with context, you may find that the tight coupling gets in your way. Since all the important decisions get made at the top, you might wish to give your employees decision-making power, but you can’t, because anything important has to be approved not just by you but by your boss and by her boss.

If loose coupling is to work effectively, with big decisions made at the individual level, then the boss and the employees must be in lockstep agreement on their destination. Loose coupling works only if there is a clear, shared context between the boss and the team. That alignment of context drives employees to make decisions that support the mission and strategy of the overall organization. This is why the mantra at Netflix is HIGHLY ALIGNED, LOOSELY COUPLED