When to NOT Decide

We’ve all been told that in order to achieve success or be a great leader one must be decisive. Waffling costs you time, and time is money! It turns out that sometimes it pays to delay your decision as long as you can.

In this first in a series on NOT deciding, I’ll cover a framework for determining when you should decide, and when you should wait. Further posts will go deeper into the strategy of NOT deciding — why it’s difficult, what to watch out for, and how to set yourself up for success.

A lot has been written on the importance of quick decision-making. Much of what you’ll read comes down to a heuristic like:

If a decision is either reversible or low-impact, decide quickly.

A reversible decision can be changed at low cost if you end up being wrong. Similarly, a low-impact decision incurs a low cost if you’re wrong. In either case, the advantage of speed to learn outweighs the cost of mistakes. This can be summarized in a nice 2x2 matrix (is there anything that can’t?). Vertically we measure the impact of the decision, and horizontally we measure the reversibility.

If your decision lands in any of the 3 quadrants discussed so far — either low-impact or reversible — decide right away and move on. But what about the top right box — high-impact and irreversible? Here the cost of a mistake is high and you can’t change your mind, so you need a different approach. Presumably, the answer is something like “take your time”. Okay, but how long exactly?

I recently took the Decision by Design course from Shane Parrish and the amazing team at Farnam Street. Their advice: for an irreversible and high-impact decision, take As Long As Possible. Don’t decide unless you have to! Shane and team give a framework to define what have to decide looks like (paraphrasing):

• First Lost Opportunity: if delaying the decision any further would cost you an opportunity, you should decide.
• Smoking Gun: if you uncover information that makes the choice clear beyond any doubt, you should decide.
• The Well is Dry: if you are no longer able to generate new and useful information relevant to the decision, you should decide.

If none of the above is true, you are in Information Gathering mode. Your actions (at a high level) become:

• If there is discoverable information that would meaningfully reduce uncertainty, go get it
• If there is new information available, work that into your assessment of the decision
• when you’re not doing either of the above, put the decision aside and work on more urgent things

By Not Deciding as long as you can, you increase your optionality. You have the opportunity to collect new information to make a better decision, and you can focus on things that require immediate attention.

Using the above framework (for which others deserve all credit) will provide a huge improvement in decision quality — primarily by identifying situations where it’s safe to decide right away. Call to Action: take stock of the decisions you’re currently facing, and determine where they fall on the 2x2 matrix. You’ll likely find a few decisions you’ve been stressing over that should be made today.

For those decisions in high impact / irreversible territory, you’ll soon realize NOT Deciding is easier said than done. It will make you feel uneasy and can cause a lot of stress on a team. Check out Part II to learn how organizing your work differently can make NOT Deciding easier.

Many thanks to the team at Farnam Street for their ideas and inspiration.