Deciding Before You’re Sure
Key Takeaways
Waiting for certainty before deciding is itself a decision, and usually one of the more costly ones leaders can make.
The most useful distinction isn't between right decisions and wrong ones. It's between reversible ones and irreversible ones.
Individual managers make hundreds of small decisions every week. Those decisions, in aggregate, are what shape the organization.
Deciding under uncertainty is a skill built through practice and reflection, not through access to more information.
What Waiting to Decide Can Cost
Most leaders don't think of hesitation as a decision. But it is. And like any decision, it has a cost. It’s one that compounds the longer a decision is deferred.
McKinsey research found that executives spend almost 40% of their time on decisions and believe most of that time is poorly used. Only 20% of organizations say they excel at decision-making. That's not primarily a problem of skill or information. It's a problem of knowing when you have enough data to act.
The leaders I work with who struggle most with decision-making are struggling because they've learned to treat uncertainty as a reason to wait. In most cases, the certainty they're waiting for isn't coming, especially these days. And the wait itself is shaping their team's confidence in their leadership.
This isn't a case for recklessness. It's a case for precision in knowing which decisions require more time and which ones are simply being kicked down the road. The research is clear on one thing: faster decisions tend to be higher quality ones. Let’s explore why that is.
How Experts Actually Decide Under Pressure
Research psychologist Gary Klein spent years studying how experts make decisions in high-stakes, time-pressured situations by observing fireground commanders, ICU nurses, and military officers. What he found challenged the standard model of decision-making. His Recognition-Primed Decision model shows that experts don't analyze a set of options and pick the best one. They recognize the situation as familiar, draw on accumulated experience to identify a workable course of action, mentally simulate it, and move.
The speed isn't from skipping steps. It's from having enough relevant experience that the steps are compressed. And the standard for moving isn't "I'm certain this is right." It's "I can't see an obvious way this fails."
One caution should be called out. The same experience that makes recognition fast can also mislead when a situation only looks familiar. Reaching for the last case that resembles this one is usually a strength, but it becomes a bias when the resemblance is superficial and the response that worked before doesn't fit the situation in front of you. Expertise doesn't remove that risk. What helps is building one question into the decision: “What would have to be true for my read of this to be wrong?” It takes seconds to ask, and it interrupts the pull toward a familiar answer that may not be the right one.
Daniel Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 framing is useful here. System 1 thinking is fast and intuitive; System 2 is slow and deliberate. Neither is inherently better. The failure mode most leaders fall into isn't applying System 1 when they should use System 2. It's applying System 2 processes to decisions that don't require them and loading every choice with analysis that doesn't actually improve the outcome.
The One Question Worth Asking First
Before anything else, ask yourself: “Is this reversible or irreversible?”
Reversible decisions are ones you can walk back if they don't work. You try something, get feedback, and adjust. The cost of being wrong is low because you can course-correct. These decisions should move faster, with less deliberation, and with more tolerance for imperfection.
Irreversible decisions are ones you can't easily undo, like a significant hire, a structural change, or a highly visible public commitment. These deserve more time, more consultation, and explicit consideration of what can't be walked back.
Most decisions are reversible. But leaders consistently treat them as irreversible. This is where Klein's research is most useful: one of the key failure modes in high-pressure decision-making is applying a heavyweight process to a lightweight decision. It slows everything down without creating a better outcome.
The practical application: before a decision sits for more than 48 hours, define it as either reversible or irreversible. If it's reversible, ask what you're actually waiting for. If the answer is certainty, ask whether that certainty will ever actually materialize. This connects directly to the patterns I write about in Why Smart Leaders Get Stuck Repeating Old Patterns: hesitation is often a long-ingrained pattern, not a response to a specific situation.
An Organization Is a Sum of Its Decisions
Individual decisions accumulate.
Organizational culture, trust, and performance are the result of thousands of individual manager decisions. Who gets asked for their opinion in a meeting. Who gets given a career-expanding assignment. How quickly a leader responds when a team member flags a problem. Whose idea gets built on and whose gets set aside. The list goes on.
McKinsey's State of Organizations 2023 found that leaders in fast-moving organizations report 2.5 times higher financial performance and 3 times higher growth than peers in slow-moving ones. That gap doesn't usually come from a single strategic decision made at the top. It comes from the compounding effect of how decisions get made, at every level, every day.
A leader who thinks carefully about their individual decisions isn't just managing themselves. They're shaping what their team experiences as normal. That's the mechanism behind the Manager Multiplier Effect: the culture of a team is, in large part, the accumulated output of its manager's daily choices.
Building the Capacity to Decide
Like most leadership skills, decision-making is not a personality trait. It’s something that you practice over time. Here are some ways to flex your decision-making muscle:
Reflect on small decisions, not just big ones. Once a week, name one decision you made and ask: was it reversible or irreversible? Did I treat it accordingly? What would I do differently? Most decision-making improvement comes from examining the small choices, not the major ones because that's where the patterns are most visible.
Set a decision threshold. Before a decision sits longer than 48 hours, ask explicitly: what am I waiting for? If the answer is more certainty, ask whether that certainty is actually available. If it's not, name the real barrier, whether it’s discomfort, fear of being wrong, or avoiding a difficult conversation and address that directly.
Build the feedback loop. Leaders who decide well under uncertainty usually have teams that give them honest feedback. That feedback loop requires deliberate investment in psychological safety and a track record of responding to input in a way that encourages people to keep giving it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't it reckless to decide before you're sure?
Only if the decision is irreversible and the cost of being wrong is high. Most decisions are neither. The more precise question is: what's the cost of waiting versus the cost of being wrong? In most cases, a reasonable decision made now is more useful than a perfect one made too late and the research on decision quality supports that.
How do I know when I have enough information?
Klein's research suggests that experts look for a workable option, not an optimal one. When you can mentally simulate a course of action and it holds, meaning you can't immediately see how it fails, you probably have enough. The search for more information past that point is usually the search for certainty, not quality.
What about decisions that directly affect other people?
The reversibility question applies here too. Decisions about someone's development, assignment, or day-to-day experience can usually be revisited with feedback. Decisions about someone's employment, formal evaluation, or standing in the organization deserve more time and more consultation. The stakes of the second category are high enough that a slower and more deliberate approach is the better path.
Explore More
If any of this resonated, here are a few related posts worth reading:
Why Smart Leaders Get Stuck Repeating Old Patterns: on how hesitation becomes habit.
The Manager Multiplier Effect: on how individual manager decisions accumulate into organizational culture.
What Leaders Miss When They Assume Alignment: on the gap between what leaders assume and what their teams experience.
Trust Is Built in Small Moments, Not Big Announcements: on why the small decisions compound in both directions.
Reflection: Think about a decision you've been sitting on this week. Is it reversible or irreversible? And what would it cost you to decide now?
If you're working through a specific decision, or a pattern of deferred ones, coaching is often the most direct path to clarity. Schedule a 30-minute call to see if it's a good fit.