As a small business owner you are faced with multiple decisions such as whether or not to make a purchase, what products to offer, pricing of products and services, etc. Without having a decision making process, most decisions you make will be ruled by emotions and not logic. This means an entrepreneur without a decision making process will abandon choices with good outcomes to follow a choice with a negative outcome which leads to even worse decisions. This is a very serious problem! As entrepreneurs it is very important to understand the problems we face and learn how to make up for our short falls. The human mind is not always rational.

According to research, people with learning orientation are less likely to pursue decisions with bad outcomes when compared to people with performance orientation. A person with learning orientation is one who seeks to learn from his or her experiences while a person with performance orientation is one who seeks to achieve a goal at all cost. Entrepreneurship by its very nature demands entrepreneurs take time to learn the ins and out. Being rigid towards a certain goal could cause a person to turn a bad situation into a worse one. Take your time and learn from your target market. This might mean changing your offerings or doing things differently than you initially planned. I always recommend entrepreneurs do the five people test. In other words talk to five people in your target market, and if you can get them to pull out their check book then your might have a winner. However, if you hear comments like “that’s nice” then you need to keep working as your solution is not solving a real problem that your target market is willing to pay for.

Performance orientation causes one to solve the symptoms rather than the problem. A performance orientation individual will deny that there was something faulty about the initial hypothesis and refuse to learn from their experiences. On the other hand, a person with a learning orientation will always ask questions to clarify the problem and seek solution accordingly. They do not tie themselves to sunk cost. Sunk cost are those resources we have spent that cannot impact future decisions. However, for some reason people refuse to let go of sunk cost causing them to make even worse decisions.

You cannot identify the problem if you have not trained your mind to. As long as you refuse to get help, you will keep focusing on symptoms rather than clearly defining the problem. This is even more so for individuals with a performance orientation. Bad decisions could lead to even worse one and trying to figure it out on your own could cause you to make even more foolish decisions.

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