#019 High-velocity decision making

#019 - High-velocity decision making.

How to make high-quality, high-velocity decisions to grow your freelance business.

Many freelancers are afraid of making the wrong decisions.

How to price, what to charge, which services to offer, and how to go to market.

While these decisions are important, the bigger risk is slow decision-making.

Slow decision-making stifles momentum and delays learning.

For much of my career, I’ve been preoccupied with making the right decisions.

Now, I’m working on building a capacity for high-velocity decision-making.

Here’s the approach I’m using to help.

One-way and two-way doors.

Think of decisions falling into two categories:

One-way doors and two-way doors.

One-way doors

One-way doors are decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse once you’ve made them.

Once you’ve moved through a one-way door, going back is time-consuming, costly, and challenging.

Examples of one-way doors in freelancing:

• Long-term client contracts: While the idea of a steady client has many positives, signing on with a client for a multi-year contract could be a one-way decision. Ending that relationship early could have legal or financial consequences.
• Brand positioning strategy: Material changes to your personal brand could cause confusion or lost of credibility with your audience. Revamping your website and materials has hard costs
• Major investments in tools or software: Once you’ve established your software ecosystem for managing clients, expenses, newsletter/lead-gen, switching to different tools could have major costs and cause disruptions.

When faced with one-way doors, we need to slow down and proceed with caution.

Seek data, consult others, and apply a methodical decision-making process.

One-way door decisions are big decisions that set up hundreds of smaller decisions.

Make them wisely.

Two-way doors

Two-way doors are quite the opposite.

These decisions can be more easily reversed or adjusted.

They are generally lower risk and offer greater flexibility.

Examples of two-way doors for freelancers:

• Experimenting with new marketing channels: If you try out a new social media platform and are underwhelmed by the results, you can pivot to a new channel quite easily.
• Testing different pricing models: If a new pricing structure you’re experimenting with doesn’t work, you can revert or adjust it without long-term consequences.
• Exploring different niches: Trying different industries to see which suits your skills and interests is relatively low risk. If you find it’s not working as you’d hoped, you can pivot to another and see if it’s a better fit.

Given the low-risk nature of two-way doors, these decisions should be made quickly.

In these scenarios, it’s better to make those decisions by yourself (instead of by consensus) and through a blend of a lightweight methodology and intuition.

If you’re waiting for perfect and complete data to make two-way door decisions, you’re likely operating too slowly.

The key here isn’t making the right decision, it’s learning to make the decision right.

Put differently, learning to recognize and correct bad two-way door decisions quickly.

Avoiding compromise

Growing up, we’re taught to compromise.

We’re led to believe that a middle ground is fair and acceptable to all parties.

But while compromises might make people ‘feel’ good, they don’t make high-quality decisions.

Compromises don’t lead to the truth. They lead to watered-down, sub-optimal courses of action.

So what do you do when you have a strong position on a two-way door decision, but there’s no consensus?

Disagree and commit.

Say: “I disagree but will commit to seeing it through.”

Then get behind it and give it everything you’ve got.

Consider how much time would be wasted in trying to convince the other party.

Think of how that time could be better spent proving or disproving the decision instead.

​
As we grow our businesses we tend to hold on to the reins more tightly.

We start using one-way door decision-making (slow, methodical, data-driven) for all decisions, even the relatively inconsequential two-way doors.

It slows us down, causes us to overlook new opportunities, and robs us of growth.

The key to high-velocity decision-making is to get good at distinguishing between one-way and two-way doors.

As you get better at it, you’ll come to see that most doors are two-way doors, and you’ll get more confident and comfortable with walking through them.

My challenge to you for this week: identify at least one two-way door and decide to step through it.

-Jeff

Freelance Marketing Alliance

‍