In Great by Choice, Morten Hansen and I conducted a systematic analysis of the pace of executive decision making, with emphasis on entrepreneurial leaders building great companies in highly turbulent environments. We found that some of the best decisions happened fast and some of the best decisions happened more slowly. We learned that the critical question to ask in any given situation is, “How much time do we have before our risks change?” In some situations, you’ll incur no significant increased risk (of either catastrophe or of missing a huge opportunity) by taking more time to decide. In other situations, however, you’ll dramatically increase your risks by waiting too long. The key is to know which situation you are in, not to have a bias for “always fast” or “always slow.” You need to be good at both. The right decision made in the wrong time frame is a bad decision.

If inefficiencies result in anyone waiting for too long, if the majority of your people aren’t engaged in the work that drives your revenue most of the time, you risk being devoured from the inside out.

We often have two contradictory feelings about the time we have available to us. On one hand we sense a time famine and feel that there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything that we need to do, let alone that we want to do. On the other hand, we tend to think that in some unspecified future we will have a time surplus, as if we’ll get to a place in our lives where the kinds of things capturing our time right now will cease to consume us.

Not every bad decision is rushed, nor is every good one made slowly. It’s not that simple.

People mistake choosing for decisiveness and the decision-making process for waffling. Part of what makes slowing down and reasoning through a problem difficult is that, to the outside observer, it might look like inaction. But that inaction is a choice.

Brilliant field studies by the MIT behavioural economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton cognitive psychologist Eldar Shafir, described in their book Scarcity, show that the scarcities of poverty (like those of time) can so focus one’s attention on immediate demands that little bandwidth is left for planning, learning about options, doing homework, and building relationships and cultural capital. The urgency of his sister’s having to rummage through garbage to find enough cans that his family could have milk and cereal at the same breakfast narrows Tyler’s bandwidth for school.