stuck on a business decision? name which of the three is holding it.
decisions do not stall for one reason. they stall for three, and the fix for each is different. most people apply the wrong one.
you have been carrying it for weeks. you have thought about it in the shower, in the car, at two in the morning. you have talked it through with someone and felt clear for about an hour.
and it is still open.
the useful move here is not to think about it again. it is to work out what kind of stuck this is, because there are only three, and they do not respond to the same thing.
one. you are genuinely missing something
you do not have a number you need. you have not spoken to the person who knows. there is a contract you have not read.
this is the rarest of the three and the easiest to fix. write down the specific thing you are missing, in one line, with a name attached to who has it. then go and get it, with a deadline.
the tell that this is not your problem: you cannot name the missing thing in one line. if what you are missing is "more clarity", that is not missing information. skip to two.
two. you do not want to own the consequence
this is most of them.
you know what the right call is. you have known for a while. what you do not want is the conversation it starts, the person it disappoints, or the version of yourself who turned out to be wrong in public.
more thinking will not touch this, which is why the thinking never ends. the decision is not unclear. it is unpleasant.
what helps is naming the specific consequence you are avoiding. not "it might not work". something concrete. "i will have to tell marcus his role is changing." "two clients will probably leave and i will have to explain that to myself."
once it is written down it is almost always smaller than the shape it had while it was vague. and if it is not smaller, at least you are now deciding about the real thing instead of circling the proxy.
three. it is not actually your call alone
you are trying to decide something that needs someone else in the room. a co founder. a partner. the person whose job it affects.
you can spend a month getting to certainty on your own and still not be able to act, because the decision was never single player. the move is not to decide. it is to schedule the conversation, this week, with the question written down before you walk in.
how to tell them apart in two minutes
write the decision at the top of a page. then answer three things.
- what specific fact am i missing, and who has it? if you can name it, that is stuck one.
- what happens right after i decide that i do not want to happen? if you can name that, it is stuck two.
- who else has to agree before this is real? if there is a name, it is stuck three.
if more than one applies, take them in order. get the fact, then face the consequence, then have the conversation.
then put a date on it
whichever of the three you are in, the last step is the same and it is the one people skip. give the decision a date and a confidence number.
the date is not a promise to be certain by then. it is a promise to decide by then, at whatever confidence you have reached. those are different things, and only one of them is in your control.
if you want a sharper sense of what the wait has already cost, the decision fatigue calculator will do the arithmetic on your own figures. and if this is not one stalled decision but a pile of them, the pile is its own problem and worth reading about separately.