During new opportunities or challenging times, you may want to take some calculated risks. These are new forks in the road that seem promising but success is not guaranteed.
For leaders, these are the moments that can produce sleepless nights. While I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have some suggestions for your decision making process:
Preparation
You’ve invested the time in research. Can you explain the pros and cons to someone? That lets you know you’ve mastered the information.
Beware of any offer that comes with a rapidly approaching artificial deadline. More often than not, that’s a sales tactic. A good deal today will likely exist tomorrow, even if it’s elsewhere.
It can be useful to give yourself a deadline for research. This can prevent procrastination.
Acclimation
When you start something new, factor in time to implement and learn. Mastery rarely happens overnight.
While you’re learning something new, other projects may be pushed aside. Make sure you have that time before trying to take a calculated risk. Otherwise, you may just create new problems.
Adaptability
To properly start something new, you may need to change some roles or priorities. You may need to bring in outside training or hire for a specific skill.
Doing something new may mean doing some new things.
Honesty
Make your change and then let some time pass. At some point, you’ll need to evaluate how things are going. Maybe this is six months or a year down the road.
On the inside, we want every risky decision we make to turn out perfectly. It may. But every successful poker player knows that sometimes you have to step away from the table.
When making calculated risks, there’s always a chance that it doesn’t work as well as you thought. For instance, you may be producing a product but an outside factors may have significantly reduced your profit margin. So the idea was great but a random thing has made it less desirable.
Try to remove emotion and determine how well things are going. This evaluation process can also be useful in that it may reveal that you made a good choice and should increase your commitment to it.
Final Question
It’s smart to be caution but ask yourself this question, “What happens if you do nothing?”
There are times when you need to make a change, even if it’s an imperfect option.
