The half-life of a good decision is shrinking

The new essential skill for tech buyers: just-in-time decision making

You can no longer assume that what was best for your organization last year or last week is best for it today. This requires a shift in posture and pace.

Where identifying technology needs and gathering requirements was once a cyclical process, now it’s becoming an almost ongoing practice. Leaders need to find ways to gather and process information faster, identify risk sooner, and make high-stakes decisions (e.g., about what software their organization might need) more frequently.

Let’s dive into that risk identification piece, which is hugely important.

Being able to quickly and consistently identify potential risks and eliminate or minimize them is essential to success. One of the most powerful resources organizational leaders have for doing this is their team. People see different risks based on the work they do and the perspective they bring to the table.

But getting people to speak up when they spot risk is its own skill.

Fifteen years ago, a leader might have said to a roomful of people, “Who thinks this is a bad idea?” And hoped to get a few insights.

In a world where the default answer (IBM) was pretty much always safe, it may not have mattered whether anyone raised their hand. Even if there were risks, nobody was going to lose their job for buying the industry standard.

In a world where we can’t default to established ways of doing things, we need to find a different way to seek out risks. Ideally, that should involve…

• Removing the moral judgment from risk identification.

• Eliminating the need for someone to go out on a limb to highlight risks.

• Creating a sense of shared purpose around identifying and mitigating risks.

Some question formats that can work in this reality:

“What’s the big thing that has to be true in order for this to be successful?”

“What is the thing that is most likely to get us off track?”

“Where’s the hidden risk?”

When you use questions like these, risk identification becomes a group effort. The decision-maker can tap the wisdom of the team to surface risks, then use their judgment to assess those risks and make a decision.

Related: Strategic software investment: Maximizing returns through effective kickoffs

The new definition of expertise: how fast you can learn and apply new information

This all ladders up to what expertise means in our current moment. The old definition is about who knows the most, but when knowledge is immediately available to everyone via the internet and skills are increasingly available via AI, that definition doesn’t speak to what today’s experts need.

My take is that the new expertise is more about who can learn the fastest: who can navigate the overwhelming inputs available, extract insights from colleagues and partners, and make a confident decision on a tight timeline—and then repeat that over and over.

This isn’t to undermine the skills that today’s experts need: you need to know what questions to ask and how to frame them. You need to understand how accurate and trustworthy information is, how relevant it is to the decision you’re making, how fast information changes in the area you’re assessing.

In the context of tech buying: what does an expert do when someone flags a problem with the system of record? What follow-up questions do they ask? Who else do they consult? When do they know they have enough information to make a decision, and what decision do they make?

How do they assess whether they’re dealing with a training issue, a bug, or a bigger-picture shortcoming that should trigger the search for a new solution?

That’s the kind of thing required of modern-day experts. That, over and over and over.

Today’s experts have to make high-stakes decisions more often and more efficiently

In the not-so-distant past, enterprise software was the kind of purchase you expected to be durable. It required a decision-making process you only had to go through once every several years.

That’s changed. Now, tech buyers are expected to make high-stakes purchase decisions much more frequently.

By making the shift to embrace just-in-time decision making and learn-fast-and-decide expertise, you’ll be better positioned to react, adapt, and adjust to the accelerated pace of change that defines enterprise life today.