One of the core principals of Lean thinking is 'Decide as Late as Possible'.   Like many aspects of Agile and Lean thinking, they can often be taken at face value and lead to less than optimal outcomes, leaving the organization with a sour taste in their mouth but with the correct application there is power.

In uncertain environments better results can be achieved with an options-based approach, delaying decisions as much as possible until they can be made based on better facts rather than uncertain assumptions and predictions.  This is of course a continuum, not an end.  If you wait too long to gather facts the organization can become paralyzed, and you may miss the opportunity.  An iterative approach with short cycles promotes this principal, giving a team the ability to adapt to changes quickly and also and correct mistakes which might be costly if discovered after long development cycles.

We had a great example of this principal in action just recently.  Back in early December a few of us got together to talk about possible product strategies for the IFA (International Franchising Association) Conference to be held in the first week of February 2010.   We batted around a few ideas, and as it started to get closer to Christmas we felt that we had to make some decisions soon given that the holidays were upon us, and that we now only had a little over a month to get ready.  However nothing seemed to be clicking yet. 

After the holidays in early January we decided that introducing a social media offering within our local marketing software tool would be the ideal launch platform for the event.  Social media was everywhere, but how to combine it effectively into a local marketing strategy is the question that franchisees are asking.  Everyone in the room thought it was a great idea   - The only problem was that we had less than 4 weeks until the start of the conference!

At this first meeting a quick sketch was made on a piece of paper of the new offering that would allow a local store marketer to publish a message and send it to Twitter, Facebook, an email list and a mobile phone list.  They could then use this message with a shortened track-able URL link to a customized web based landing page for more details about the offer (all designd to tie into their existing local advertising).   

Within 3 weeks we took the hand sketch and converted it into a ascetically pleasing, fully functioning prototype of the offering, that we deployed to the production version of our local marketing software on its regular bi-weekly release schedule the day before the conference started.  We actually even had all the development work done more than a week prior to this point, so it wasn't an all night-er for our engineering team the day before!  So what happened?  The sales team at the conference promoted and used it on the trade show to produce one of our largest lead gen opportunities in months. 

Just-in-time decision making is critical to allow a business to make the highest value decisions with the least amount of cost or waste.  Yes, its a fine line between just-in-time and too late, but you will never get good at it until you practice.  Think Lean!