Puya’s Question

I was fortunate to go to our company consultant development program event this year and I was asked a number of thoughtful questions and I wanted to publish a more thoughtful reflective answer to one of those questions.

Q. from Puya: Dealing with delayed feedback and evaluating actions and decisions in the short term is crucial for effective decision-making and strategic planning. Here are some deliberate practices to help you navigate this challenge

This is a really interesting question. I was always told that often as you rise in leadership you get to make more and more decisions and some of those decisions are not felt or can only be judged as a success after a year or two. These decisions as Puya intelligently asks are very hard to measure or track. I answered this question in the room with my best thoughts at the time but below is my answer with a week to reflect. I hope it is useful.

Dealing with delayed feedback and evaluating actions and decisions in the short term is crucial for effective decision-making and strategic planning. Here are some deliberate practices to help you navigate this challenge.

First of all yes Puya, you are correct. I have struggled with this myself and my best answer is to apply the following three methods.

1. Devise Milestones Rethink your approach by disassembling your aspirations and strategies into attainable, bite-sized waypoints. These may manifest as weekly, monthly, or quarterly objectives, offering a more frequent cadence for monitoring and gauging your advancement.
2. Key Performance Indicators Are a a bit of buzzword in business but if you can in this case identify KPIs that are relevant to your goals and regularly monitor them. They can provide quantifiable metrics that can help you assess some immediate impact of your actions and decisions and over time they can be assessed to see if the direction it is headed in is where you intended.
3. A Regular cadence of Feedback: Create a dynamic feedback ecosystem. Cultivate accessible conduits of communication, you can foster an environment where team members seamlessly share insights on actions and decisions in real-time.

Dealing with delayed feedback is a challenge in strategic decision making, but the practices above help me maintain agility and adaptability in a rapidly changing environment. Regularly assessing short-term outcomes and making adjustments based on the information available will ultimately improve my long-term strategic decision-making.