Decisiveness
Committing on incomplete information, then correcting as more arrives.
The behaviour, in one line: I make decisions with incomplete information, commit, and correct as I go rather than stalling.
You check your pockets before a one-way door and walk straight through a revolving one. Most stalled decisions are a revolving door being treated as a one-way door, and the deliberation ends up costing more than the mistake would have.
Nearly every decision gets made without enough information, because enough never turns up. Waiting for it costs more than a slightly wrong choice made early, and the cost is invisible — nobody logs the two weeks a decision spent open. Most decisions are also reversible, which means the right speed for them is fast. The care belongs to the few that are not. Two things have changed. More decisions are reversible than ever — a deploy can be rolled back, a draft rewritten, an experiment switched off — so the right speed for most of them has gone up. And there is no longer any end to the information you could gather first, which means waiting for enough no longer terminates on its own.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Care spent on the irreversible | Care spent on everything |
| A date on the decision | A date on the work only |
| Deciding at seventy per cent | Waiting for the last thirty |
| The outcome as information | The outcome as a verdict on you |
What it looks like. A choice has been open three weeks and the arguments stopped changing in the first one. You pick, write two lines saying why, and note what would make you reverse it.
- Anything blocking other people. An open decision does not only cost you the delay. It costs everyone who cannot start.
- Choices that are cheap to undo. A deploy that rolls back, a draft, an experiment behind a flag. These are most of them, and they are where deliberation does the most damage per hour spent.
- Working faster than the information arrives. Which is now normal. If you only decide once it is clear, you will decide after it mattered.
- Sort by reversibility first. Most people spend their care on the wrong pile.
- Put a date on the decision itself, not only on the work. More time rarely buys proportionally better choices.
- Decide at around seventy per cent of the information. The remaining thirty usually only shows up once you have moved.
- Commit properly once you have decided, and read the result as information rather than as a verdict on you.
- Break it into parts
Three parts: sorting by reversibility, putting a deadline on the decision itself, and committing fully then reading the outcome as data.
- The part that carries it
The reversibility sort. It tells you which decisions deserve speed and which deserve care, and most people have those two the wrong way round.
- The order to learn it in
- Sort your open decisions into reversible and irreversible, and notice how few are really the latter.
- Then put a date on each reversible one, and decide at roughly seventy per cent of the information.
- Then practise committing fully, and reviewing the outcome as data rather than as a verdict on you.
- Put something at stake
Take your three longest-open decisions, put a date on each in writing, and give the list to someone who will ask.
- Compress it
Reversible? Decide fast, at seventy per cent. Irreversible? Slow down. Then commit, and review the outcome rather than yourself.
- The smallest useful dose
One stalled decision closed every week.
- Anchor it to something you know
A one-way door and a revolving one. You check your pockets before the first. You walk straight through the second, and walk back out if it was wrong.
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Decisiveness run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Decisiveness in the course →
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