Long Term vs Short Term Decisions - The Decision Clinic

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]We're much more as humans geared towards the short-term. And frankly, it's something that we really in Australia could do a lot with learning from our First Nations people about the value of intergenerational wisdom, both looking backwards and looking forwards, and much less focus just on what's good for me right now. And we know that's a human bias. How do we provide enough principles and support that help us bust through that and as you say, take away some of those time constraints on decision-making. And then decision time horizons that don't align that that are driven by the wrong thing. Your listed companies driven by the quarterly results reporting. Now, many decisions you're making can't possibly turn out any kind of result in the quarter, but they have to turn the result out. You constrain your decision-making by the wrong dimensions, the same as a term of government or the same as a term of a CEO. Those are time things that exist in the world, we can't ignore them, but we make our decisions driven by them and that's frankly back to front.

[00:00:55]Absolutely. But, you know, we talked earlier about kind of spectrums.

[00:00:59]And I'm a firm believer that if we can move away from extremes of thinking, that's usually where the answer is. Yes, we need more long-term focus, but we also need to balance that with short-term results as well. And however you get there, is different schools of thinking in terms of actually dividing budgets up across those two things, which I think is probably a little bit fraught with issues. I certainly having a focus on delivering across both those time horizons, I think is the reality. You can't do everything for the long-term and completely ignore the short-term, particularly in that broad sense of marketing that we talked about.

[00:01:34]And so, it's balancing that.