Deciding with 70% information: why waiting for 100%? It kills growth!

There is a quiet addiction in many leadership teams: the addiction to “just a bit more information”.

I recognise it very clearly because I’ve had it myself. You sit around the table as CEO with your management team, you have a reasonably clear picture, you see the trade-offs… and still someone says, “Let’s collect a bit more data before we decide.”

On paper, that sounds smart. In reality, in a lot of SMEs and scale-ups, it’s just another way of saying: “We’re not ready to commit.”

The hard truth is that in dynamic environments – and if you’re operating in today’s markets, yours is dynamic – you will almost never have 100% of the information you’d like. And if you wait for it, you’ll often discover it only arrives after the window of opportunity has closed.

More info on the book

The myth of 100% certainty

In the companies I work with, I see this myth in different forms.

Sometimes it’s the belief that “one more customer case” will unlock the perfect positioning. Sometimes it’s a financial projection that needs three extra scenarios. Sometimes it’s a technology evaluation that goes on for months because there is always a new feature or vendor to compare.

Underneath all of that is a very human fear: the fear of being exposed as the person who made the wrong call.

The problem is that by waiting for 100% certainty, you create a different kind of risk:

• you let competitors move while you’re still studying,

• you demotivate your team because nothing ever really starts,

• you build plans that are already outdated when you finally approve them.

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” I argue for a different standard: aiming for around 70% information and clarity on most growth decisions.

Not because 70% is mathematically magical, but because it forces you to accept the reality of imperfect knowledge and the need to learn in motion.

What 70% looks like in practice

Seventy percent doesn’t mean sloppy. It means you have:

• a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve,

• a reasonably robust picture of the main options,

• an idea of the biggest risks and how you might mitigate them,

• some signal from the market (clients, partners, data) that this is worth trying.

You don’t know every detail. You don’t have a guarantee. But you know enough to say: “If we wait longer, our learning will not improve significantly. It will just shift into the future.”

For many decisions in a SME or scale-up – entering a new segment, adjusting pricing, launching a pilot, investing in a new role – that level of understanding is both realistic and sufficient.

Distinguishing between types of decisions

Of course, not all decisions are equal. One thing I work on with CEOs is simply sorting decisions into two broad buckets:

• Those that are hard to reverse (selling the company, closing a factory, fundamentally changing ownership structures). For these, you want more analysis, more scenarios, more counsel.

• Those that are relatively reversible (testing a new offer, piloting a pricing change in one region, starting with a new channel, hiring for a role you’ve never had before). For these, 70% is often more than enough to start.

The problem is that we often treat reversible decisions as if they were irreversible. We give them the same weight, the same endless preparation, the same fear. The result is that we move far too slowly on things we could have been learning from months ago.

Building 70% decisions into your 100-day plan

A 100-day window is ideal for practising this muscle.

At the start of the period, list a handful of decisions you’ve been dragging along because “we’re not ready yet”. For each one, ask:

• What do we already know?

• What would we need to know to be at 70% confidence?

• Can we get that in the next few weeks?

• What small, controlled step could we take now to turn this into a real-world test instead of a theoretical debate?

Then commit to landing at least some of those decisions within the 100 days, even if it means starting with a pilot instead of a full rollout.

You’ll notice that once you act, new information comes to you that was never going to appear in a spreadsheet or a meeting room.

The emotional side of 70%

All of this is easy to write and harder to live. Deciding with 70% information means accepting that you will sometimes be wrong. That’s uncomfortable, especially in cultures where leaders are expected to “know”.

As CEO, you set the tone. If you can say, “We took this decision with the best information we had, it didn’t work the way we hoped, here’s what we’re learning and changing,” you give your organisation permission to experiment responsibly instead of hiding mistakes.

If, on the other hand, you punish every imperfect outcome, people will keep chasing 100% certainty on paper before they dare to move. And that’s how organisations slowly lose their ability to grow.

In the end, the question is not whether you can get to 100% certainty. You can’t. The question is whether you’d rather learn in theory or in practice.

Your next 100 days as CEO are going to pass anyway. You can spend them trying to eliminate all doubt, or you can spend them building a company that gets smarter by making thoughtful, timely moves.

Seventy percent is often more than enough to start.