What's The Worst That Can Happen?

Every day we are faced with a multitude of decisions covering a broad spectrum of things; what tie should I wear today? Should I ask her out?  Do I have time to stop for coffee? At what price point should I launch my product? Should I kill feature X or add feature Y? Can we afford to hire another person for this project? Can we afford not to? At times these decisions can pile up and become nearly crippling (the well used cliché analysis paralysis). We spend far too much time weighing options and worry about outcomes.  Often it’s a better idea to just DO SOMETHING! Don’t spend all your time analyzing and modeling and worrying. Ask yourself what is the worst that can happen and then just try something and see if it works.

I should note that this method will work for all businesses. Even if you have a business with huge product development costs, long development times and where changes are going to be really expensive you can still use this method. What’s the worst than can happen? Well, the worst can be pretty bad, so make sure you diligently analyze options and weigh costs.

But for most of us there is an innate bias toward overestimating risk and underestimating gains. It can be extremely difficult to overcome this bias, but asking what’s the worst that can happen is a good method. (Suzy Welch recommends asking what are the implications 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now. I think this achieves much the same goal.)  The important thing is to realize that most decisions we make are not going to have huge implications. It’s usually better to make a decision, execute based on it, and then move onto the next thing. Because really, what’s the worst than can happen?

Good Talk,

Tom