Handling Analysis Paralysis
A framework to use when situations paralyze your decisions
I have often found myself in places where decisions are hard to make. You get the feeling that there are forces that are pushing you ahead, and forces holding you back. And it is a confusing mish-mash that makes it hard to know what to do, and if indeed you need to do something at all.
I am not talking about hard decisions where you know what to do. Let me step back a bit here and outline the kinds of decisions we typically encounter in management (and personal lives as well):
- Easy Situations — These are the ones where we have a single path ahead, we know what we have to do and agree with our available options (Ex: taking a job to earn money or staying penniless, feeding your kid or letting them go hungry, hiring employees to manage your increasing workload or suffering burnout and loss of customers)
- Hard Situations— These are the ones where we know our options, we agree with what we have to do, but lack the willpower to take action (Ex: encouraging your kids to leave home for college, firing poorly performing employees when you actually care about them)
- Paralyzing Situations— These are the ones that have no right answer. There seem to be too many factors and influences coming at you from within your mind and from your external environment. Just when you think you are clear about your values, you discover something about yourself that makes you question those very values. And just when you think you have understood your environment and the market, new factors pop up to upset the apple cart. (Ex: Deciding the direction to grow your company, choosing how to spend your savings or budget between team recreation and security, taking a leap of faith in switching jobs or careers, choosing to leave an unsatisfactory relationship — professional or personal)
Why are Paralyzing Situations hard?
- It is easy to make decisions when everything is against you — your instinctive ‘fight vs. flight’ response will give you the clarity you need
- It is easy to make decisions when nothing is clear. You stay still and do nothing, and wait for the situation to develop.
- Paralyzing Situations have neither of these qualities. These situations are fully developed in a very well-rounded manner. The number of pros and cons of taking any decision balance each other out. They make you question what you know about the world, and what you know about yourself.
Clearing your Head- The Process
I developed my own process to ‘clear my head’ — so here it goes (lots of analogies ahead, but hope they help clarify things). There may be similarities to other approaches out there, but this is something that works for me:
- Understand your mind: Your mind is a container and you are the person sifting through that container. But you can’t arrive at a decision until you actually categorize all your thoughts . This is similar to Cluster Analysis in data analytics terms — aka unsupervised learning. What you are learning here is about yourself (inner world) and your environment (outer world).
- Pour out your thoughts on paper or a journal. This is similar to white-bearded Dumbledore (Harry Potter?) using his Pensieve to study his thoughts, separate from his mind, your journal or notes become your Pensieve. To provide another analogy, your mind is like a computer but a bad one. When there are too many thoughts, your mind behaves like both the RAM card and the hard disk. An overloaded mind then shifts from ‘think/ RAM’ mode to ‘storage/ hard disk’ mode. Pouring out your thoughts shifts your mind’s ‘storage/ memory capacity’ onto paper, freeing your ‘thinking/ RAM capacity’ for decision making.
Classify your thoughts into buckets
I find that a matrix structure is highly useful in understanding the confusion paralyzing your actions. Classify your thoughts into External and Internal influences, positive and negative.
Don’t stop till every single thought and emotion has been classified into one of these buckets. If something doesn’t fit neatly into one of these boxes, put it in the middle somewhere, between one or more quadrants of the matrix. For example:
- If you are not sure if something affecting you is all in your mind or if you are actually seeing things — that goes somewhere in between internal and external.
- If you are not sure if something makes you feel good or bad, put that somewhere in between positive and negative.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function — Scott Fitzgerald
Remember, it is okay to have multiple thoughts and emotions at the same time. Only a mature man/ woman can hold contradictory ideas and still be at peace. People who are not open to more than one way of seeing things (in very complex decisions) can tend towards fanaticism at least and ineffectiveness at best.
Understand the buckets and your current priorities
The underlying reason situations paralyze you is because they challenge your deepest values. That is perfectly fine — our values change every single day, month and year; they have been changing from the time you were a toddler to the time you became a teenager and became the adult you are today. You are continuing to grow as an adult and growth means a constant revisiting of what you value within yourself, and in the world.
Change is good, it cleans your life from the inside out. And as you analyze the bucketed matrix above, you may realize that you have changed or are changing. You may realize the world you imagined (external) is not the same as the (real) world staring back at you from the piece of paper you hold. The world keeps changing every moment, and that is fine too.’
Discover the decision that needs to be made
Relax, take a breath and be willing to let go. Take a look at the matrix again and understand two things:
- Who you are now —as defined by your internal thoughts and emotions (positive and negative)
- What the world or market is like now —as defined by your external influences (positive and negative)
Once you complete the above process and achieve a better understanding of yourself and the world/ market you are dealing with, the decision that needs to be taken will become clear to you.
