When no one decides, the decision still gets made

In my high school years one of the ways we escaped hanging around at home was to drive around town. One of my friends had his own car so that meant we had to listen to his music, often some form of classic 70s/80s rock and more often than not was the Canadian band Rush - a powerhouse of prog rock. Much of their music centres around themes of life, philosophy and science fiction, peaking with 1976's 2112, a 20-minute rock opera complete with light, shade and multiple ripping guitar solos.

But it was the philosophical side of the band which was the real attraction for my deep thinking and enigmatically intellectual friend. One of his favourites was Free Will:

Right there we get a great life lesson. It's something that has stuck with me since, and I think shapes much of my thinking even today. Not only that you can choose your own path, but that your choices include even the things that happen when you don't make a choice.

I've seen this often play out where difficult decisions are left too long, work continues, dependencies stack up and the window from which to make the choice quietly shrinks.

So, in this post let's explore why indecision happens in teams, what happens when we don't make timely decisions and how we can rethink our approach to decisions to allow us to move forward on the things that matter.

Why indecision arises in teams and complex systems

To be clear we're not talking about the hesitation to pick which pastry to have with your coffee or which series to start streaming. This is a fascinating avenue of research — exploring how much free will we actually have when it turns out to be far less than we think.

Instead, we're talking about high-stakes decisions with substantial consequences that tend to involve multiple stakeholders all with competing interests. This could be things like whether to restructure a team and adopt a new operating model, or if we should stop a project which cannot seem to get ahead of itself, or if enduring some short-term pain will be worth a longer-term gain.

We're talking about the sorts of decisions where the information we'd like to have at hand isn't available and the stakes are far too big to just trust our gut.

A common justification for delay is waiting for more certainty or the availability of more information. We'd like to have more analysis done or find ways to get more alignment or collaboration with stakeholders. It's famously hard to reason about complex systems and we get sucked into the vortex of analysis paralysis.

The problem is that while we delay to gain more certainty to make the better decision, we end up actually embedding the default decision anyway. What we think is a prudent course of action is really just avoiding dealing with an unmanaged commitment.

How delivery systems make decisions on your behalf

The mechanics of how we get into this position are often at the end of a series of decisions that on their face are reasonable and prudent.

For example, stopping work on a troubled project may be regretful if we decide to pursue a bold recovery strategy for that project. However the action of continuing to work while we consider the options only serves to increase the sunk cost trap of that project and to make it harder for stakeholders to then make an alternate choice.

We see other examples of path dependency shaping architecture, procurement and staffing concerns where each passing week of indecision only ossifies those pre-existing pathways increasing the cost of reversal. Then when cost and schedule pressures increase they become the force that settles the issue. What was once a wider range of possible futures has now collapsed to a single pathway.

Why leaders defer and what gets lost

It's easy to put the blame at the feet of leadership, but we also have to recognise that leaders are being asked to make more high-stakes decisions more frequently with incomplete information. The stakes are high, there are real trade-offs and there are political costs to being wrong. Allowing things to get to the point where the system has forced the choice is an understandable response to today's dynamic business environment.

However, leaders need to recognise that by avoiding the discomfort of an explicit decision we're often left with a worse decision with less transparency and less control. The delay that feels like caution is actually an abdication of responsibility.

That might sound a bit harsh, but if we accept that much of what makes great leadership is the tending to and sustaining of the strategic environment, then we can recognise the threat that indecision is.

While we're waiting for the decision, costs escalate because teams build around ambiguity, rework accumulates, and temporary measures persist. Strategic options narrow because each workaround, staffing choice, and sequencing commitment makes reversal harder. Worse, trust erodes because teams can see a choice is being made in practice while leadership continues to describe the situation as open.

A more useful strategic frame

The solution here isn't to harden up, be courageous and just be more decisive. That might be a spicier hot take, but our goal isn't to force premature certainty, rather we want to make the status of a decision explicit.

This means classifying those decisions we must decide now, which ones we can defer deliberately until a specified trigger, and the ones we can proceed experimentally with some bounded reversibility. Integral to this classification is also naming the cost of waiting in addition to the usual risk analysis.

By treating decision timing as a first-class concern, we have opened another degree of freedom for our strategic thinking. We can be clear about what we need to decide now even with suboptimal information and to be clear with our stakeholders that we're actively making a choice. And for the choices which are not urgent, we can thoughtfully employ strategic waiting to see if higher leverage positions emerge as the future evolves.

Practical implications for leaders and program environments

The key behaviour we want to promote is to not leave unresolved decisions buried in meeting minutes. These open loops must become visible so that we can collapse them. We need to define:

• What remains undecided
• What continues in the meantime
• What commitments are accumulating while waiting
• When the option meaningfully expires

Leaders need to ask not only do we have enough information yet but also what decision is the system already making for us. They need to shape governance routines such that they can surface and make visible those de-facto commitments early and clearly enough for stakeholders.

I will choose a path that's clear

Unlike the subject of the song Free Will, organisations rarely get the luxury of not deciding. We often forget that in the wider strategic environment, momentum, dependencies and time are active decision makers too — unless leadership takes that role explicitly.

The consequences of inaction are usually greater than making the wrong choice. The real discipline is not simply making decisions fast — it is refusing to pretend that drift is neutrality.