Companies don’t stall for lack of ideas

If you walk into a company that hasn’t moved forward for a while and ask what it’s missing, hardly anyone will say “ideas”. There are plenty of ideas. There are projects in the managing director’s head, proposals in the team’s emails and half-finished plans in some shared folder.

What’s missing is something else. And after many years walking into companies, I can tell you what it is.

Analysis paralysis

I remember a company with good ideas, a good product and a good team that had come to a complete standstill. What was holding it back? Too much analysis. What’s commonly called analysis paralysis.

Every important decision needed one more study. Every study opened up three new questions. And meanwhile, the market kept moving.

There was a second problem, even more damaging: constant changes of criteria in the middle of execution. When something was finally decided and the team got going, a change of course would arrive a few weeks later. The team learnt the wrong lesson: why bother, if everything will change next week.

Analysis is necessary. But analysis needs a beginning and an end.

The first thing I changed

The first step was to agree a healthy period of analysis and reflection. With a start date and an end date. During that time, everything gets asked, everything gets discussed and everything gets questioned. When it ends, you decide.

And then, define execution with four questions that I consider essential:

1. What exactly we’re going to do.
2. Who is responsible. One person, not a department.
3. When it has to be done.
4. How we’re going to do it and how we’ll know it’s working.

It sounds simple. It is. And that’s precisely why hardly anyone does it with discipline.

The three phrases that stall a company

There are phrases I’ve heard from many managing directors to justify not deciding. If you recognise yourself in any of them, don’t worry: it’s the first step out.

“It’s not the right time.” It’s never the right time. There will always be a reason to wait: the quarter-end close, the holidays, market uncertainty. What I tell them is that, with calculated risks, you have to go for it. Waiting is also a decision, and usually the most expensive one.

“I need to assess the risks more.” Fine. But that analysis is ongoing, not a preliminary step that never ends. Risks are assessed before, during and after. You don’t need to have them all under control to start; you need to know what they are and what you’ll do if they materialise.

“Let’s discuss it again.” And that’s how meetings become endless and decision-free. An issue that’s been debated three times without a decision doesn’t need more debate. It needs someone to decide.

How I know in a first meeting that a company has stalled

There’s one sign that almost never fails: the quality of the decisions. Or, put another way, too much brainstorming.

If in a first meeting I see lots of debate, lots of interesting ideas and no decisions, I already know a fair bit. A meeting with no clear objective and no decisions isn’t an effective meeting. It’s a symptom.

Other signs that tend to go with it:

• Projects “under way” for months with no end date.
• Nobody can say who is responsible for an initiative.
• The same concerns come up in every meeting.
• The managing director is the only one who can unblock anything.

The good news

A company stalled by indecision can be unblocked much faster than a company with no product or no market. Because the problem isn’t outside, it’s inside. And what’s inside depends on you.

You don’t need a new idea. You need to decide what to do with the ones you already have, put a name and a date on each one, and stop reopening the debate every week.

If you have several options and don’t know which to choose, try the Decide better tool: it compares your options and calculates how much waiting is costing you.