You will likely make daily decisions that require little thought. (Like, am I going to wear pants today? The answer for me is maybe.) But other decisions will demand a bit more of your attention.

These decisions, in their many forms, can be stressful and time consuming if you spend hours, days, maybe even weeks deliberating and strategizing and gathering the facts in order to build and commit to a solution.

What if I told you that there was a way to reach your decision point faster, achieve and surpass desired results on a consistent basis, and reduce the chance of failure when facing difficult or complex decisions?

I knew you’d like the sound of that.
If you want to make better decisions, get quick results, and fail less, this is all you have to do:

Always opt for a 70 percent solution now rather than wait for a 100 percent solution later.

Anyone who just cringed, please raise your hand.

I get it. We’re conditioned to think that 70 percent is mediocre at best. Settling for a 70 percent in a school environment might not always be advisable, but intentionally targeting and embracing 70 percent solutions in business and in life might actually serve you well.

The difference is that in the latter, a 70 percent solution now is the ticket to your eventual best possible solution.

Here’s why:

1. A true 100 percent solution prior to execution does not exist

Any time you attempt to devise a 100 percent solution in planning there are variables you are not accounting for (because you can’t).

A 70 percent solution will cover the core of your problem and the variable details will fill themselves in as you go. The 30 percent that remains can only be truly ascertained, assessed and incorporated into the plan once you’ve implemented, observed, and obtained feedback.

Attempting to build anything more than a 70 percent solution before you give yourself or your team the green light is a waste of time and energy. So get to 70 percent and then get started.

2. 70 percent makes it easier to pivot and harder to fail

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” This is something I first learned to embrace during basic military officer training.

Tasked with navigating complex team-based problem sets with hardly any helpful information and very little time to plan, I quickly learned that the best practice was to piece together just enough information to get started, and adjust course during execution.

In retrospect, I was operating on a 70 percent decision-making mentality and reaching 100 percent solutions after I began executions of the plans. Sometimes the path to 100 percent looked completely different than the original plan, but changing the plan was (fairly) painless–as it was incomplete in the first place.

If you embrace the fact that the ground truth may force your solution to change, then you’ll feel more comfortable about moving forward at 70 percent. In essence, you are implementing something that you know is not a total solution.

By doing so, when the situation does change, you are not over-committed to a strict plan. This drastically reduces the chance of complete failure or the need for a total reset and restart by preemptively building in the capacity to pivot.

3. You might spend too much time thinking you can plan a 100 percent solution and miss the boat

Life is fluid; things change constantly. The moment you identify a situation that requires a solution, the situation is already experiencing change.

Setting your 70 percent solution in motion now gives you the advantage of implementing in an environment with conditions most similar to the ones that surrounded you when you first identified the problem and began planning.

In 18 Lessons on Leadership, retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell promotes committing to a solution once you feel like you have enough information to have a 70 percent chance of success (he says you can go as low as 40 percent!).

He writes that waiting too long to gather what you might think is all of the information will result in the situation moving on without you–rendering your intended plan ineffective.

So as you go about both your personal and work life, remember to give up a little bit of control–call it 30 percent, if it makes you feel more comfortable–in your decision making process, especially when faced with challenging decisions. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of a 70 percent solution.

Credit:Inc. Magazine

URL:http://www.inc.com/gj-nolan/want-faster-results-and-less-failure-try-this-counterintuitive-approach-to-decis.html?cid=+sf01003&sr_share=linkedin