Having a ‘bias for action’ means not being afraid to make decisions. It’s a trait that’s encouraged and celebrated in business, but it has its limits. If you haven’t already, I’d strongly recommend reading Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Professor Richard Rumelt. It’s one of the most clear-eyed books on strategy I’ve come across, and it challenges a lot of the assumptions that pass for strategic thinking in most organisations.
Rumelt’s central point is that the most common path to success is not raw innovation but skilfully riding a wave of change. The danger of a bias for action is that it encourages people to leap into execution before they’ve properly understood the problem. Action for action’s sake carries real risk, the risk of an incorrect diagnosis. And if your diagnosis is wrong, everything that follows, the goals, the plans, the investment, is built on a flawed foundation.
Thinking through the ‘real’ business problem requires diagnosis. It requires sitting with ambiguity long enough to identify what’s actually going on, rather than defaulting to the first plausible explanation. A bias for action is, at its core, a cognitive bias, one that pollutes strategic thinking by rewarding speed over accuracy.
As you look forward, don’t mistake ambitious goals and effort for strategy. Robust strategy starts with robust diagnosis. From that diagnosis flows a guiding policy, an overall approach for dealing with the obstacles identified. And from that guiding policy flow coherent actions, coordinated steps that work together to carry out the policy. Without that chain of logic, what you have isn’t a strategy. It’s a to-do list with ambition.
