Hi Reader,

A leader I'm working with described a moment from a particularly hard quarter.

Numbers were bad. Two people created a war room… intense, focused, urgent. Others felt it was their job to get energy going, so they started lobbing criticism. Another part of the business kept pushing for more content and visibility. Everyone thought their world was the most important one.

Nothing got decided. A lot got said.

Afterwards, the collective verdict was: "we're bad at making decisions."

I'm not sure that's what actually happened.

The decisions aren't the problem. What's missing is honesty about three things that sit underneath them.

The trade-offs aren't named.

Every decision has a price. Speed or quality. Consistency or flexibility. Short term stability or long term growth. Most leadership teams discuss the options at length and then make a choice - without ever explicitly naming what they're giving up. Six months later, the thing they gave up becomes a complaint. The decision looks bad in hindsight. But it wasn't a bad decision. It was an unnamed trade-off.

People don't like the outcome, so they call it a bad process.

"We're bad at long term decisions" is sometimes accurate. It's also sometimes a way of saying "I didn't get what I wanted and I'm not willing to say that."

Nobody admits how hard the decision actually was.

Some decisions are *really* complex. The information is incomplete, and the stakes are high. But the norm is to project confidence and the decision looks arbitrary to anyone not in the room, and when it doesn't land well in broader organisation, the team looks incompetent rather than human.

The war room story ended with a team that had plenty of energy and no shared understanding of what they were actually deciding together or what they were willing to give up to get there.

The core problem is an honesty problem.

If your leadership team has "we're bad at decisions" on its list of things to fix it's worth a conversation before you design any process around it.

​[Book a diagnostic conversation →]​

Catherine

P.S. The most useful question I ask leadership teams isn't "how do you make decisions?" It's "what happens to a decision once someone disagrees with the outcome?"