As ever, the Practice of Leadership blog has another interesting article – this time dealing with the inability to act with a company.

“If your strategy doesn’t help employees act, it’s not a strategy.“

Quoting from Fast Company article entitled , “Analysis of Paralysis” :

“Researchers Eldar Shafir and Donald Redelmeier helped prove this point in an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They gave doctors the medical history of a 67-year-old man who’d been suffering chronic hip pain from osteoarthritis. He’d been given drugs to treat his pain, but they had been ineffective, so there was only one viable option: hip-replacement surgery, which would involve a long and painful recovery. Then a final check with the pharmacy uncovered one medication that hadn’t been tried. Would the doctors like to give the drug a shot? Forty-seven percent of doctors chose to try the medication in a final attempt to keep the patient from going under the knife.

Another group of doctors saw the same facts, except they were told that the pharmacy had discovered two medications that hadn’t been tried. If you were the patient with the bum hip, you’d be thrilled–two nonsurgical options are better than one. But when the doctors were presented with two nonsurgical options, only 28% chose to try either one.

What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us, leading us to stick with the “default” plan, which in this case was slicing open someone’s hip. This clearly is not rational behavior, but it is human behavior. Similar tests with different groups have revealed consistent results.

Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your organization. Every business must choose among attractive options: growing revenue versus maximizing profitability, quality versus speed to market. Fold together lots of these tensions, and you have a surefire recipe for paralysis. It took only two options to fuzz the doctors’ brains. How many options have your people got? As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, ‘we become overloaded…. Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.’ …. Simplicity is the way out. Imagine if the doctors in the psychology study had worked for a hospital with the mission statement, ‘Invasive treatments should be a last resort.’ Suddenly, the choice isn’t so paralyzing, even with two drugs. The statement is simple because it makes a decision easier, not because it’s dumbed down. Doctors aren’t idiots.”

The underlying principle is that: Simplicity allows people to act.
Going onto quote Jack Welch’s set of six leadership principles:

1. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were.
2. Be candid with everyone.
3. Don’t manage, lead.
4. Change before you have to.
5. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete!
6. Control your own destiny or someone else will.

These principles gave people a means to guide their decision making and actions, knowing that they were acting in the spirit of their leader’s vision. What principles do you use to guide your actions? Is your team aware of your principles? Do they understand them? Do you use principle with your team to guide how you go about achieving your vision? If not, this may be a good time to focus on developing a set of principles to guide how your team goes about achieving your vision.