Value of making choices quickly in a healthy organization

It’s a helpful parable to think about the value for organizations which can make choices quickly. It’s generally much healthier to make decisions fast and be flexible at recognizing when a mistake has been made and correcting course when it becomes clear that a different solution is needed.

A nice example from our own business is when we made the choice to stick with Postgres as the platform to go with the fleet manager. We could have spent a heap of time putting together committees to fully evaluate all the potential alternatives to Postgres like elastic search etc. etc. The problem is that it would have taken a lot more time and its unlikely we would have made a better choice since at the time we wouldn’t have understood as a team what we *really* needed.

By moving quickly and making the choice to run with Postgres - even though it didn’t prove to be the correct solution - we learned quickly and we moved on. We learned much more about the nature of the problem with Iguana’s logs and so it then became more obvious that a different solution - i.e. building our own custom solution - was a reasonable path. The great thing is there wasn’t a lot of politics or nonsense about changing course - we could see as team that a different solution was needed.

It could have been different - it could have ended up a huge political choice as to what platform we went with, reputations could have been invested in the choice made which would have made a difficult political argument to change course and admit we’d made a mistake.