Scenario Paralysis: Are You a Victim?
by Tim Walker
A little while back I quoted Michael Bloomberg on how he built his eponymous business:
“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”
Are you a victim of planning how to plan for months on end? Years, maybe? (Or even your whole career so far? Be honest with yourself.) A friend of mine has called this “scenario paralysis” — the trap we fall into when we imagine all kinds of possible future scenarios . . . and thereby get stuck.
Why do we get stuck? I think it’s because we’re sooooooo freakin’ smart that we imagine that we can look into the future accurately, even though a backward glance across our lives would tend to disprove that.
We overanalyze because we think our highly-trained rational minds can dig us out of holes that are created by non-rational forces. Or, to put it another way, we don’t know how to come to grips with the emotional challenges we face in business, so we fall back on something we know we’re good at — rational analysis — even though it’s not the right tool for the problem at hand.
What’s the #1 non-rational/emotional force? My bet’s on plain old fear.
We don’t want to venture into the unknown; we don’t want to go through the sorts of mistakes that Bloomberg’s crew made. It’s a heck of a lot more comfortable to do another flowchart or hold another planning meeting instead, especially if you work in a corporate culture that responds poorly to mistakes or otherwise prizes “rightness.”
Now, dear readers, I turn it over to you:
Do you suffer from scenario paralysis?
What do you suggest for fighting it?
