Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

Crocs deliberately accepted declining sales while it reduced discounts, restricted supply and cleared stale inventory from the market. Its experience shows why the earliest result of a decision does not always tell us whether the decision was right.

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When Crocs found itself with too much inventory and slowing sales, discounting offered the most immediate response. Lower the prices. Move the excess stock. Improve sales in the short term.

Crocs chose another course.

The company reduced promotions, limited the supply of some products and removed stale inventory from the market. Its executives understood that these actions would cause sales to decline.

They proceeded because continuing to discount would have created a larger problem.

Frequent discounting can move products, but it can also teach customers to wait for the next sale. It can weaken the perceived value of a brand and allow excess inventory to remain in circulation, taking up the space that newer products need.

Crocs accepted the short-term consequences of correcting the problem.

Sales contracted for several months. The company had anticipated this. The decline was part of the decision rather than evidence that the decision had failed.

We often judge a decision by what happens immediately after it is made.

If sales fall, customers complain or progress slows, we may conclude that we chose incorrectly. Yet some decisions interrupt patterns that have been producing misleading comfort. Once those patterns are disrupted, the situation may look worse before the benefit of the correction becomes visible.

The quality of a decision cannot always be determined by its earliest results.

Crocs was making a choice about the health of the business. That required the company to protect the value of its products, regain control of its inventory and create room for fresher designs. The short-term sales decline was the price of restoring those conditions.

The decision is now beginning to pay off.

The Crocs brand has returned to growth in North America, international sales are rising and more products are being sold at full price.

There is another lesson here. Crocs did not make the decision and then panic when the expected consequences arrived. It remained committed to the reasoning behind the choice long enough to see whether the strategy could work.

This is one of the harder disciplines in decision-making. A leader must distinguish between evidence that a decision is failing and discomfort that was always going to accompany its implementation.

Without that distinction, an organization can reverse a sound decision at precisely the point when it needs to hold its course.

Before making a consequential decision, leaders need to consider more than the result they hope to produce. They must also identify the effects the decision is likely to create along the way.

• Which results should appear first?
• What temporary decline, resistance or disruption should be expected?
• What evidence would indicate that the decision is working?
• What would genuinely justify changing course?

A decision becomes easier to abandon when its foreseeable consequences have been mistaken for unexpected failure.

Crocs understood that protecting the health of the business would hurt its immediate performance. It chose with that knowledge and allowed the decision enough time to do its work.

Sometimes the right decision does make things worse first. The challenge is knowing whether the difficulty is evidence of failure or part of the correction already underway.

Strategic Reflection prompt

What foreseeable discomfort might follow a decision you need to make, and how will you distinguish that discomfort from evidence that the decision itself was wrong?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer and Pre-Fixer. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?