How much feedback do you really need before making a decision?
It seems straightforward, but when the stakes are high, and emotions are heavy, its more complex than it appears. We have to consider several factors and the consequences of the decision options we have.
When you add the growth needs, time and effort commitments and costs, the decision making is even more complex. Feedback can seem like an unnecessary burden.
But feedback is crucial, ultimately its needed to ensure we aren’t blinded, and that we are de-risking our decisions. The issue is more about how much feedback do we need before we take action.
Deciding where to go for lunch requires far less consultative feedback than deciding where to go on holiday or what property to buy.
And this is the point, feedback is needed, but it also needs to be proportional to the significance of the issue, it does make senses to do a 10,000 person multi-page survey to decide what to wear in the morning, neither would you commit your life savings to NFTs based on a random conversation with a guy in the pub.
With this in mind, we need a heuristic framework for how to approach getting feedback that is proportional to the risks, complexities and urgencies of the question-decision.
Its actually really simple –
Urgency * complexity of factors * cost (time/$$$/etc) = feedback needed / expertise
In other words, the more urgent, the more complex, the more costly (in terms of resource), the more feedback you need. Next, you’ll notice the feedback side of the formula is divisible by expertise, so this is a counter balance… implying, the deeper and more recognised the expertise of the feedback, the less (volume) of it you need, if you’re choosing to by a house, and you’re asking laymen you need proportionally more laymen than property experts, and if you have a professional property expert to ask, then you make only need one data point of advice to be sufficiently de-risked.