Making Decisions With Incomplete Information: A Founder’s Reality (Part 1)

One of the harder aspects of leadership is making decisions when the information is incomplete.

And because in early-stage companies you’re often doing things for the very first time, you don’t have precedents to look back on. Incomplete information is therefore often the default situation. You may be dealing with messy data or conflicting signals, and sometimes the information you need simply isn’t available within the timeframe you have, because a decision still has to be made.

If you wait too long before acting, you may end up frustrating your co-workers, and the organization’s culture may start to feel bogged down. When decisions get made quickly, people’s energy stays high, projects move forward, and forward motion becomes part of your company culture. You don’t want the opposite to be the case.

Look, as a leader, the first thing is simply to accept that this is part of the job. You are going to make decisions with partial, imperfect information. That’s the gig!

So once you accept this, the question becomes how to approach decisions intelligently.

Although it may sound self-evident, the first thing I do is step outside of the problem and recognize that getting to a decision is going to be a process. Instead of trying to solve it immediately, I give myself permission to slow down and think about how the decision should be approached.

I then gather as many perspectives as possible. That means talking with industry experts if you can, trusted friends who understand your business, a mentor, and of course key members of your own team who will ultimately be responsible for executing whatever decision gets made.

Importantly, when I ask for input, I don’t just ask for opinions. I ask people to explain their reasoning. Why do they think a particular path makes sense? What assumptions are they making? What risks do they see? Asking people to articulate their thinking often reveals insights that I might not have thought of otherwise.

The effective use of AI as another input in this process is a relatively new option — and one that should become muscle memory. I will often describe the situation and ask AI to outline possible upsides, downsides, and risks that might not be obvious at first glance. It doesn’t replace human judgment, but it can add another perspective to the ones you’re already getting.

At some point, however, gathering information stops and leadership begins.

No matter how many perspectives you collect, the responsibility for the decision ultimately comes back to you.

(Part 2 will look at how to actually make the decision once you’ve gathered the inputs.)