Learnings from AWS – Bias For Action
Bias For Action
If you’re not Amazonian enough to grasp what this means – It simply tells you to be biased towards action over inaction.
Say, you are put in a passage way that had 10 doors – each one a different colour, and you have to choose a door. Anything behind the door is yours.
Are you the person who just immediately chooses any door at random? OR Are you the one who carefully weighs the colours and their symbolic meanings, the thickness of the paint on each door that may denote the importance attributed to each door, the order of the doors and what not?!
If like me, you belong to the second group – Remember that there was no other information provided to you. You chose to conjure information, form unconscious biases just to make a decision that could have been a split second one! In fact, no one told you that you couldn’t open more than one door. So why the reluctance to act? The catchphrase you don’t want to associate yourself with is Analysis Paralysis
“Thinking too much” was always my Achilles Heel. From purchasing a toothbrush to deciding on a leisure destination to a career move, I took an eternity to make a decision. While the pursuit of making just that perfect decision was the primary driver of the delay, what often happened was that by the time I made the decision, the joy and excitement would have already worn out or the opportunity would have already passed by.
So when I started at AWS, I was both happy and nervous to work in an organisation that emphasised the importance of “Action” so much that it prioritised it as one of the top 14 things it wanted its employees to focus on. “Bias For Action” was a bare minimum!
During the start of the performance year, when AWS asked me to identify a “Growth Area” for myself, I was glad to pen down “Bias For Action” or rather the lack of it as the one area I wanted to focus on. This helped me consciously pursue a remediation path and AWS provided me ample opportunities and resources to overcome this struggle. At the end of the year and my time at AWS, when I sat down for self-introspection, I realised that:
- Because I made quicker decisions, I was able to do a LOT of things. I noticed at least a 3x boost in productivity.
- In addition to productivity, doing more helped me learn more.
- Because I was preferring action over prolonged analysis, I realised that I had unconsciously started making many smaller decisions versus one big decision! This dismantling helped me simplify the decision-making process which contributed to speeding up the decision making which in turn helped me act faster. A beautiful cycle to be stuck in!
An obvious corollary of all this was that I had become an expert at Time Management and to me, this was a huge milestone!