Deciding Not to Chase Every Change

The year so far

A chatbot in December, a more capable version in March, a competitor's answer a week later, a search experiment this week, and several product features between them.

Each arrived with coverage describing it as fundamental.

A business that responded to all of them has changed its site, its process, and its spending five times in six months, on the basis of announcements rather than results.

Which is a considerable amount of work for a year in which nothing measurable happened to most of them.

The three-part test

• Is it available to you here.
• Would it show in your own figures.
• Does it change a decision you are making.

All three, or no action. Most of what has been announced this year fails the first, several fail the second, and almost all fail the third, which is the one nobody applies.

The third question is the useful one

Since availability and measurability are usually obvious.

Ask what you would actually do differently, specifically, this month.

If the honest answer is nothing, then the item is information rather than a trigger, and reading it was sufficient.

Where there is a specific action, it is frequently something you should have been doing anyway, such as getting prices onto pages or asking for reviews.

In that case the announcement is a prompt rather than a cause, which is fine and worth recognising as what it is.

What is rare is an announcement that creates a genuinely new action.

A worked example

A business kept a note of every industry announcement they read about between December and May, with what they did about each.

There were eleven, of which they had acted on four.

Reviewing them in May, three of the four actions had been things worth doing regardless, and one had been a subscription they had since cancelled.

Nothing they had ignored had cost them anything measurable.

They now read the same material and write a line about what they would do differently, which is usually nothing.

The note takes a minute and has replaced most of the anxiety.

Distinguish preparing from reacting

Which is a real distinction and gets blurred.

Preparing means doing things that are useful under several possible futures: reviews, prices, photographs, an email list, a baseline of your own figures.

Reacting means changing something specific because of a particular announcement, which requires the announcement to be right.

Everything on the preparing list is worth doing whether or not any of this year's announcements amount to anything.

That is what makes it the sensible allocation of attention in an uncertain year.

And it is unglamorous, which is why it competes badly with responding to news.

Notice who benefits from urgency

Since the pattern is consistent.

An announcement is followed within days by services sold against it, and the selling is easier while nobody can evaluate the claim.

That is not necessarily dishonest, and it does mean the volume of advice peaks exactly when the evidence is weakest.

Waiting a quarter costs almost nothing and lets somebody else establish, at their own expense, whether there is anything to it.

For a small business, being second is a perfectly good position in almost everything that has been discussed this year.

Keep a note rather than a plan

The practical habit.

One document, one line per announcement: what it was, whether it is available here, and what you would do differently.

Most lines end with nothing, which is the point of writing them.

Six months later that document tells you which things turned into something and which did not, which improves your judgement about the next one.

It also gives you an answer when somebody asks whether you have seen this, which is a more comfortable position than either dismissing it or scrambling.

Set a review point instead of acting

Where something genuinely might matter later.

Rather than acting now or dismissing it, put a date three or six months out to look again.

By then it will have shipped, changed, been abandoned, or become available here, any of which is more information than you have today.

That converts a decision you cannot make into one you can make later with better evidence.

Most items reviewed that way resolve themselves without ever requiring an action.

Decide who reads this at all

A structural point for anybody with staff or a supplier.

Where three people follow industry news, three people bring urgent items to the same meeting, and the business spends its time discussing announcements rather than customers.

Name one person to follow it and report anything passing the three questions, which is usually nothing in a given month.

That is not incuriosity, it is putting the filter in one place rather than having everybody apply their own.

It also stops the situation where whoever read something most recently has the most influence over what the business does next.

The counter-case

Ignoring everything is its own failure.

Businesses that dismissed the last several shifts as noise took years to catch up, and the pattern of dismissing change is as costly as chasing it.

Some announcements do require action, and a security notice, a price change, or a platform closing is not the same category as a product demonstration.

And being early occasionally pays enormously, which is a real if uncommon outcome and worth acknowledging rather than dismissing.

The three questions are a filter rather than a wall, and something passing all three deserves acting on quickly.

Apply the three questions, act only when all three hold, and put a review date on anything that might matter later.

The habit

1. Ask if it is available here.
2. Ask if it would show in your figures.
3. Ask what you would do differently.
4. Write one line about it.
5. Act only if all three hold.
6. Set a review date otherwise.
7. Keep doing the preparing list.

Step three is the filter that removes almost everything, since an announcement that changes nothing about what you would do this month is information rather than a reason to act.

Reading update news proportionately is covered in what Google changed and nobody noticed.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.