The difficulty with such an emphasis on facts is that, unfortunately, facts are often a lagging indicator of what could potentially be important. By the time you are dealing with a fact on the ground, whatever led to it has already happened.
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Hard numbers can be helpful if they can help you to identify a trend or discontinuity by looking at patterns over time. In and of themselves, however, they are not particularly helpful if your goal is to understand the future and to see around the corner.
The dilemma is that when the challenges facing an organization are not about repeatable execution, but about innovation or responding to complexity, the idea of breaking things down into well-understood parts is not only unhelpful, it can also be a dangerous trap.
Empowering individuals to take action broadens the amount of experimentation an organization can undertake, increasing its odds of seeing the early warnings of an inflection point in a timely way.
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.
The person closest to the problem often has the most accurate information about it. What they tend to lack is a broader perspective. The person working on the line at McDonald’s knows how to fix a recurring problem at their restaurant better than a person merely analyzing some data. What they don’t know is how it fits into the bigger picture. They don’t know whether the problem exists everywhere, or whether the solution wold cause more harm than good if implemented globally, or how to roll the idea out to everyone.