Welcoming bad decisions
I’ve written before that even large companies, ones you might expect to know better, make silly decisions. What may not be obvious is that bad decisions are not only inevitable but good.
That sounds odd, but here’s a short proof. Good decision-making often requires time, effort, or expertise. Given that all decisions aren’t equally important, it doesn’t always make sense to expend or acquire those resources. Therefore, we will sometimes make a decision that turns out to be wrong in retrospect, because we decided not to undertake the work required to make a better one. This is a good thing.
It’s a good thing because, given finite resources, there’s no way to always get everything right. If we’re lucky, we may sometimes get to choose where we make our mistakes, but that is all. In those cases, we should choose to screw up less important things, because the only alternative is to screw up more important ones. This isn’t a surrender to mediocrity; it’s an acknowledgement of limitation.
So, do you remember that time you left that ugly button on your website because you couldn’t think of anything better, and you just felt like drinking a glass of wine and watching the sun set? You made the right call.
