How to Make Better Decisions Faster: Ideas To Improving Your Decision-Making Skills

In a startup, founders face most difficulties alone. They make important decisions on a daily basis. Besides, some of these are “life or death” decisions. You cannot be right all the time, however, in order to succeed as a startup, you need to make the correct call on many of these occasions. But it doesn’t stop at that. Making the right decision is now always enough. As a founder, you need to be both correct and fast when making important decisions. 

Decision-making is a skill that you will improve over time, but there are some frameworks that could help you along the way.

The Power of Fast Decision-Making

There is a whole field dedicated to improving your decision-making speed. Some project or product management frameworks are even built on decision-making. Think of “Agile.” In essence, it is a decision-making framework that focuses on the importance of making decisions based on data and feedback. It is well proven that agile decision-making helps people to make decisions faster. Since gathering data is an important part of the process, using tools like Scrum is proven to help track progress and see what is planned for that week. 

Even though the aim is to make faster decisions, you can’t make a true “quick” decision without allocating ample time to think about it. You might be in the midst of a big project and think you don’t have the luxury to dwell much on these decisions. Imagine you have to put together a team. Are you going to jump on the “too risky” candidate who’s been there for only two days, or will you choose the highly experienced one? You cannot immediately jump into a decision without weighing the options. 

Moreover, just because you made a decision doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to deal with its consequences. During the startup stages, this is the toughest challenge you’ll face. Many founders make decisions while operating in a disorganized fashion, only to see their companies go bankrupt because of it. Some of those founders thought that the decision was too important to be left to chance.

But there’s a way to deal with these situations and be as quick as you can about them. 

How to Decide Better

As a founder or CEO, you are in charge of making a lot of decisions. These could include things like how to set up a team, hiring or firing people, or if you should keep a potential partner or client waiting. You will most likely be making these decisions as they occur, and not a moment too soon. You’ll want to have a framework to make these decisions faster. That’s where behavioral science could come into play and help you make better decisions. Behavioral science is a set of tools to help people make better decisions. 

As someone who has spent most of my career working on making better decisions as a startup founder, below, in the second part of this article, I will be sharing some ideas that you can use in your day-to-day life to improve decision-making. 

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