Tech executive Sheryl Sandberg, frustrated by slow ad sales at Google, personally cold-called potential clients instead of waiting for potential advertisers to pitch her. Known primarily for her roles as Chief Operating Officer at Facebook and author of Lean In, Sandberg revolutionized the way businesses rely on search engines and personalization to advertise their businesses by prioritizing meaningful action to move forward.

If you have ever used Google or Facebook, you can thank Sandberg – and a principle known as “Bias for Action.” Her bias for action helped transform AdWords into a multi-billion-dollar business, proving that speed and direct action can outpace strategy alone.

Bias for Action is also one of Qeap’s core principles. It involves prioritizing meaningful activity – not busywork! – toward your goals. If you live by the principle of Bias for Action, like Sandberg did, you can make great strides in your professional and personal life. 

Keep reading to learn more about Bias for Action and how you can apply it in your everyday life to help tackle even your loftiest goals.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Bold Actions Helped Google Succeed

Sheryl Sandberg joined Google in 2001. At that time, Google’s founders had largely ignored ad sales and the search engine’s advertising platform. The prevailing idea back then was that automation, rather than more personal interactions, would be the best way to approach Google’s advertising platform. As a result, at the beginning of Sandberg’s time at Google, her team had only four employees.

Disagreeing with the status quo at Google back then, Sandberg went against the grain to quickly grow her team from four people to 4,000 people to make personal appeals to potential business partners. In doing so, she helped make two Google advertising platforms profitable: Google AdWords, which is for businesses that want to pay to advertise, and AdSense, which is for publishers and website owners who want to earn money from ads. 

Sandberg climbed the corporate ladder until she became the vice president of global online sales and operations. Under Sandberg’s leadership, Google’s advertising platform not only skyrocketed revenue at Google, but also paved the way for many other tech companies to deliver personalized ads. In 2008, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg hired her to be Chief Operating Officer, where she served as #2 in command before retiring in 2022.

Sheryl Sandberg trusted her gut and took bold, courageous action. In the seven years she was at Google, she acted swiftly and grew the company tremendously. Her story shows that the “Bias for Action” principle is crucial to achieving success faster and more effectively.

What Does It Mean to Bias for Action?

Sandberg realized that, when it comes to driving action, the challenge isn’t setting a goal, but ruthless prioritization of one’s time and energy to make actionable progress toward the goal. That is what Qeap is all about. As a 13-week program, Qeap helps people achieve in three months what might otherwise take a year (or more). Key to Qeap’s approach are seven core principles, including “Bias for Action,” which encourages Qeapers to spend more time acting to achieve their goals. A Qeap is a 13-week block of time that includes a week of planning plus 12 weeks of action towards your goals.

So, what exactly is “Bias for Action,” or “action bias,” you ask? It’s an approach to making decisions that favors action over inaction. Psychologists have observed and written about action bias for decades, and the good news is that we are wired to act towards accomplishing our goals. Researchers at Harvard and Boston University found in a 2000 study that people are inclined to act to “foster improvement.” Furthermore, in the book A Bias for Action by psychologist Heike Bruch and management scholar Sumantra Ghoshal, the authors state that the goal of their writing was confronting “busy idleness” – in other words, delineating the line between meaningful action and busywork. They state that only 10% of managers act with purpose towards important goals. 

The bottom line? Action is good, but it’s always important to think before you act. That is what distinguishes meaningful action from busywork. A study of elite soccer players showed that goalkeepers, who optimally should stay in the goal’s center, “almost always jump right or left.” In this case, the goalkeeper could have avoided action and would have had a better outcome than allowing the other team to score a goal.

Regardless of whether getting to your goal (no soccer pun intended!) involves doing more or working more strategically, “Bias for Action” can help get you there. It is perhaps best known as one of Amazon’s 16 leadership principles that guide Amazon executives, managers, and employees. Their take? Make decisions thoughtfully, but quickly. “Don’t take weeks to get done what could get done in days or hours,” says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Sometimes, the dimensions in which you want to excel will conflict, and part of the job is to figure out how to find the right balance, but “you can be fast while still having high standards,” Jassy says.

Why Bias for Action Helps You Achieve Your Goals

Biasing for action means prioritizing actions that get you closer to your goal...and that starts with a clear understanding of the work to be done.

We make up to 35,000 decisions each day. Some are smaller choices we make every day as we go through our routines: that’s stuff like what shirt to wear, which way to take to work, or what cereal to eat. Others can be more far-reaching and life-changing: in a split second, you can decide to quit your job and buy a plane ticket across the world or to stay at your desk and keep working. You can decide to go on a date with someone new or stay in. You can decide to call a parent or respond to a coworker’s email. Factors like routine, planning, and motivation make some of our decisions easy to make, but we still spend a lot of time making decisions, and sometimes, the right decision does not make itself immediately obvious. 

That’s where bias for action comes in: it shortens the time we spend mulling over our decisions. As Wolfram Schultz, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, wrote in 2015, rewarding behavior is defined by the action that it produces. In other words, there is a reason we spend so much time planning our next move as humans. We tend to spend time eliminating risk and keeping ourselves safe, as neuroeconomists Paul Glimcher and Ernst Fehr write in their 2008 book, Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain.

Bias for action prioritizes meaningful action over busywork and inaction, which can be especially helpful in a new situation like a first Qeap.  Of course, it has its own drawbacks, like the potential for mistakes that could have been anticipated with more planning; increased risk as decisions are made faster; and the need for a supportive environment where failures are viewed as learning opportunities.

So, if you are deciding whether to perform an action on your bucket list, do it. If you are deciding whether to set a goal that pushes you outside of your comfort zone, set it. Stop spending time trying to figure out if your goal is worth it and spend that time working towards it instead. 

Bias for action increases risk, which feels counterintuitive; but approached in the right way, it has helped build great things like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. It is possible to live by the bias for action principle but still reduce risk while doing a Qeap or working toward a goal. Next, let’s talk about how to reduce risk when making a decision.

How to Reduce Risk When Making a Decision

We’re wired to choose the safest options to help us survive in the world, so here’s how to reduce the risk of failing at your next goal – another lesson from the folks at Amazon.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy believes that speed can be achieved through intention and decision. Knowing how to make a decision fast can be learned and practiced. But how do you make a decision without taking a huge risk? Jassy says that he encourages Amazon employees to learn to discern between a one-way door decision and a two-way door decision. 

One-way decisions are riskier, so you want to minimize those, but two-way decisions are reversible, and therefore inherently less risky. And luckily, most decisions are two-way door decisions. If you make a two-way door decision and things go wrong, you can walk back through that door.

But if you make a one-way door decision, there’s no going back. You can’t “undo” the decision. When you encounter a one-way decision, take more time to weigh the risks of your decision and consider whether the risk is worth leaving your comfort zone. 

Let’s apply this principle to a Qeap. You want to be a better runner. Maybe, during the preparation phase of your Qeap (Week 0), you decide you want to spend the next 12 weeks of your Qeap training for a marathon. But you’re undecided. Should you really run a marathon, you ask yourself? 

It’s a big decision, but it is a two-way one: you can take the risk with minimal consequences. If, ten weeks in, you decide that you don’t want to do the marathon, you won’t have lost anything except time and your marathon registration fee. After ten weeks of training for the marathon, you will have gained a lot of muscle, discipline, and confidence in yourself as a runner. Realizing that it is a two-door decision helps you avoid “analysis paralysis” and pushes you forward in your Qeap goal.

Signing up for the marathon is a two-way door decision and there is little risk involved in signing up. So you do it. It’s as simple as that. 

Failing Fast and Forward

“Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.” - John C. Maxwell

Discerning between one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions reduces the risk of failure but does not eliminate the risk of failure. Failure happens, and it happens to everyone. When you do fail, you have to consider where you go from that failure.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggests that you fail fast and forward. This means that when you do fail, you recover from failure quickly and use it as momentum to move closer to your goals. 

“Failure” is often a label that we put on the result of our actions. We decide if we have failed or not. Consider, then, if you can change the way you view failure and see the path ahead of you differently. Did you learn something from a failure? Will you use the failure as motivation to keep moving or to try something new? Did you make new connections or discover new opportunities on the way to your failure? 

What if you saw those developments for what they were: part of the journey forward? 

This is what it means to fail fast and forward. Even though the result of your actions may not be what you anticipated, you haven’t gone “backwards” in your journey to your goal. Let that be the motivation for you to build resilience (another core value of Qeap!): get up, brush yourself off, and try again.

Bias for Action in Qeap

“Bias for Action” encourages Qeapers to prioritize action. It’s that simple. After Week 0, Qeap is all about action. Qeapers should keep a list of up to ten actions that will move them closer to the goals they set in Week 0. The actions that make the most impact are most important, and all other actions come afterward. 

At the end of each week, Qeapers are encouraged to calculate their “Action Score,” or “AScore.” The AScore is the result of the number of actions completed divided by the total number of actions planned for the week. The goal is to reach 80% week after week. 

This mindset encourages Qeap users to dive into their goals with vigor, adapting and adjusting strategies based on the real-world feedback and results they collect through their actions.

Balancing Planning with Action

Qeap is designed to give Qeapers enough time to set clear, strategic goals through sufficient planning. After completing this planning in Week 0, Qeapers can begin Week 1 with confidence. They have a flexible guide toward their goal and ruthlessly prioritize action over looking backward or “paralysis by analysis.” Each action provides insights on how to pivot and adapt, helping Qeapers choose the best actions every week until the end of the Qeap. This approach, free of strict planning over the 13-week period, ensures that Qeap users can bias for action towards their goals with a plan flexible and resilient enough to navigate the inevitable uncertainties of any ambitious endeavor.

Embracing a bias for action doesn't eliminate planning. Instead, the balance invites Qeapers to engage in succinct, purposeful planning. Qeapers plan as if they are sketching a map with key landmarks. This map is a guide, but it doesn’t reveal everything Qeapers will encounter along the way. By knowing the destination and the major obstacles, Qeapers can trust themselves to navigate the specifics as they go.

By balancing extensive planning with a bias for action, Qeap users can work towards achieve their goals more effectively while enjoying the journey of continuous growth and learning.

With Qeap, You Can Work Towards Your Loftiest Goals

Think about your biggest, most ambitious goals. What is holding you back from actually achieving them? Sometimes those big goals that feel impossible just need a consistent investment of time and effort to become more achievable. Qeap can help you reframe large goals into smaller actions that can help you move forward by ruthlessly prioritizing meaningful action.

Ready to start your Qeap? The Bias For Action Start Kit will aid you in taking immediate, decisive steps toward your goals. These cards will make things happen.

This is a two-way door decision. So don’t doubt yourself—get the cards and get started.