Latest / UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps / Your Decision Problem Is Actually a Planning Problem
Transcript
- Mickey Anderson: 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 solopreneurs 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, regardless of the type of organization. And in the next 20 minutes, I'm gonna show you why it's the most expensive problem that you've got in your business right now. And I'm gonna 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 chat 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 five to ten X 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 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 a gentic into specific functions within the organization, which would mean Some contraction in head count in 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 going to 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, twelve 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 and thinking it was the wrong decision when 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 he's brought in from Tier One 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. From that, we can start thinking of what we call courses of action. Usually there's three different options we're looking at. So I'll use the CRM example for simplicity's sake. If we were to come up with three courses of action for that CRM scenario, The problem is I have a duct tape solution that's costing me 10x more than it needs to, and it's got really janky integrations that aren't allowing my business to work or function properly. That's the problem. The solutions or the courses of action that we're looking at could be going with a big box CRM. It could be a niche solution with a few integrations, or it could be building your own with Claud or Chat GPT or whatever your tool of choice is. Those are your three courses of action. And we're not just gonna look at the different tools. We're gonna look at the actual plans for each of them to compare and contrast and make the right decision. When we're looking at those plans for each of those, we need to understand the factors that will materially affect the success of the project, which could be time, it could be resources, it could be integrations, it could be those features and functions that we're talking about, the things that we absolutely need, the tool, the process. plan to have in place. The next is the assumptions we're making. We're assuming that we have Jim in tech who's got time and capacity to build this project out for us. We're assuming that our customers in competition aren't going to panic when we tell them that we have our own self-built tool, et cetera. Then we're looking at the assets we have. So this is I have head count, I have this much capital, I have this much time, I have these tools, I have these integrations This is what I've got to play with. Then we want the risks. What could happen? What could go wrong? Where could we mess up? What is the contingency look like to fix that? And then what are the success signals? What would tell us that we have a successfully implemented project? What would success look like at the end with this CRM? We've spent this much, we've spent this much time, we've got this tool doing this thing. ⁓ we're paying, you know, what is the solution to the outcome book? So a few rules that make this process work really well. The first is that we need clarity before you start digging into solutions. So we need the true objective or the true problem, the mission. What is it the heck we're doing here? Making sure everyone's aligned on that before you sit jump into solutions. The next is multiple options. Like I said, it's usually three courses of actions we're comparing against. Then we want to look at time boxing. So this could take forever if you let it. We want a time box. So once we understand what the problem is, we're going to separate out into groups and have the team who would be executing the plan, not leadership separated from the project. The actual team is coming in to build those COAs, to build those courses of action. You'll t break them out and you could box it into 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour. You want it time boxed, and they're going to go in and build out their plan. So say for example, it's the CRM. We're going to say, you know, Jim and Sally. You're gonna go and build the plan in the next 30 minutes for HubSpot if we were gonna go with a big CRM box. Alan and Whitney, you guys are going to look at that niche integration version and come up with the plan for that. And then Amy and Ted are gonna go and look at Claude Code and what it would take there. You guys are gonna come back. You're going to brief us on what your plan is, what the assumptions you're making, what the phases look like, the time, the resources, the execution, all of that. You're gonna brief us on each of those. That way I'm going to make the call at the end of this on which option to move forward with. Everyone's gonna know what the plan looks like because we've gone through this process together. It's going to be pretty obvious which one's the best one. And then we'll move forward into getting set up to execute on it. Then it's the decision making time. So, like I said earlier, you've got leadership making the call based off of the plans built by the people doing the work. Hugely important. Now, what type of a decision is it? That's important to know. Is this a collective decision where everyone gets a vote? Is this the leadership team? We're gonna have a collective decision. Is it, you know, I'm getting input from the leadership team and from all of you, but I'm making the decision myself. That needs to be clear so that everyone understands who's the deal maker, what's the decision gonna look like? And then when yes is said, it's a go. The decision is made, everyone commits around it, we're all in this together, go. Final rule is called rehearsal. We want to have a rehearsal of concept before jumping into execution. So if we're going to go through with that big box solution, say Alan chose to go with HubSpot, great. We're going to go through together as a team the phases, we're going to talk about what needs to happen, when it needs to happen. We're going to actually rehearse it as if we're doing it, what the migration looks like, what are the components? What are the steps? So that way when it comes time to execute. We've done this. We know what could happen. We're all good and clear. Handoffs are clarified. Assumptions are tackled. It makes it so much better. And you'll see, you know, the Blue Angels are a great example of this. They do this where they'll sit in a room together with their eyes closed and essentially not actually in the planes, running through what their run looks like in real time. Operators do this, they'll, you know, do the full rehearsal before they go out on the operation. It's so important. And no one does this. It's such an important tool to be able to rehearse before going into execution. You will save yourself infinite time and money on that one. All right. So the big takeaway of this is don't separate your decision making from your planning. The decision and the planning go together. And so you want to tackle those at the same time whenever possible. You want to look at the different options, have a full plan of what it's going to take, what it would look like. And then you can make a really informed, strong decision, understanding the risks, the implications, the impact, the assumptions you've made. You've gone through that due diligence. Your team's gonna know what's happening because the team built the plan and you're all aligned around it. The reason why this is so important in today's day and age is people are moving so fast that they're making calls so quickly without doing that due diligence, and it's biting them in the butt. And then they look back and think, ⁓ I chose the wrong tool or I did the wrong thing. When in reality, they just didn't plan it properly. They didn't look at the options and actually go through a structured process to make the right call. They rushed and jumped. And I can't tell you enough, this is so worth taking the time to go through. The new competitive advantage, this day and age, with so much speed is really about clarity and execution. And that comes from this process right here. Take it. I want you to give it a test run. I want you to think about a decision that you've been working through, that you've been sitting on, that you've been researching for a while and that you've been stuck on, and take the time to work through what your plans, your courses of action would look like for the different options. So if it's a CRM, these are the three ones I'm looking at. This is what it would look like to implement this one, this one, and that one. Work through it in a time box situation. You're gonna have so much more confidence in making that decision. Take the time to build the plans before you make the call because then when you make the decision, you can jump right into execution with speed, with confidence, and you're gonna be able to move things forward with your team way faster. Now make sure to subscribe to Unleashed. We have a new episode every week, and we are starting to bring on some incredible business owners and industry experts to tackle what it takes to build a thriving business in a decade no one is prepared for. be a lot of fun. So make sure to subscribe, hit that bell for notifications. And we will see you in the next episode. Finally one together.