Software Satisficing

Awhile back, I read The Paradox of Choice – a business book about consumer decision making, and how “the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.” It was a good book, a quick read and interesting.

One of the main premises is that we make ourselves unhappy by trying to “maximize” too many decisions – finding the very best thing – rather than “satisficing” – finding something that meets our needs, deciding it’s good enough, and moving on. The book offers a lot of evidence that shows that trying to maximize everything leads to being overwhelmed with choices, stress, time wasting behaviors, and regret about the decision after the fact.

Hmmm, decision paralysis, stress, regret about choices – kind of sounds like the nonprofit software realm, doesn’t it? Which got me thinking: are nonprofits trying to maximize too many software choices? The nonprofit tech sector has a tendency to recommend extensive planning processes to end up with the very best software for your needs – but is this really the right way to go?

If you’re looking at expensive, mission critical software, you’d likely want to maximize to ensure you’re getting everything you can for your money. But nonprofits use a lot of software that isn’t mission critical – where picking something that will work without a lot of angst makes sense. And the types of software that are mission critical is likely to vary from nonprofit to nonprofit.

And truthfully, in an environment where many nonprofits can’t or won’t do the planning required to maximize, certainly satisficing is a lot better than flailing and picking something nearly at random because the planning process you’ve been told to do is so overwhelming you panic.

So I think it’s an important thing to consider: what strategies can we offer nonprofits to help them satisfice when it makes sense to do so? What would resources designed to help satisfice rather than maximize look like?