That's the source of a lot of dysfunction in companies: someone with absolutely no skills or experience in a thing doing a thing and doing it badly.

(For example, managers wholly untrained in interview skills conducting user research and fundamentally misunderstanding the needs of their customers because they lack the skills of a professional researcher, and then releasing a product which tanks and they still don't know why.)

You get better at doing things through guided deliberate practice. A manager can learn research skills, but only through formal training and supervised practice. Ditto pretty much any other skill, including the very widely underdeveloped skills of corporate business administration.

You're right about needing a mindset that is willing to learn and willing to change. That is very, very true. A technique called "assertive enquiry" suggests maintaining a position of "I have a view, but I might have missed something."

That fear around making decisions also ties back to the common dysfunction around not using professional researchers and analysts: you understand on some level that you have no idea how to do it, and you also know that there's nobody else around you who knows how to do it either, so you avoid deciding at all rather than knowingly committing to a decision based on bad data.

You can't eliminate risk altogether, though - strategy is a series of educated guesses.

If your competitor can take the ground out from under you that quickly, you don't have a sustaintable competitive advantage. Having one buys you time to weigh your options more thoroughly, and knowing prioritisation frameworks equips you to balance risk and reward.

The best leaders use the most reliable information they can get their hands on and then make bold, rapid decisions based on the knowledge that even if their competitors move at lightning speed, it is impossible for them to fully imitate them. You will never have 100% of the information you need, but with high quality data, you'll feel confident to make those decisions when you have just enough.