The Hunt for the Right Decision Is Often a Hunt for Cover

The executive hunting for the right decision is often collecting approval, not an answer

When someone who runs a company asks how to make the right decision before a large call, the question sounds like a request for a method. Behind it there is usually a loop that has been running for weeks: the same decision described to a partner, to a former boss, to a board member, to a friend, and once to two people on the team. Each conversation leaves the executive a little calmer and no more certain.

The conversations do not make the decision clearer, because each one carries more than information. The moment the other person says something, they take a small piece of the decision on themselves. When one says “I would do it,” the end of the responsibility is shared; when one says “I would wait,” it is shared as well. Without noticing, the executive has stopped making a decision and started building agreement around one.

Information and share are different things

An adviser does two jobs, and both arrive in the same sentences. One is information: what a person knows that the executive does not. The other is share: a portion of the consequence set down on someone else's shoulders. Information goes into the decision. Share only accompanies it, and it makes the decision harder to take, because the more share is sought, the less of it ever feels like enough. Searching for the right decision is often the most reasonable-looking way to avoid carrying the outcome alone.

This is not a weakness of character. It is the weight of the seat: part of every decision cannot be divided with anyone, and that part is most of what people mean by the loneliness of leadership. The loop eases that loneliness by instinct; noticing that what eased was not the decision is separate work.

The people consulted do three different jobs, yet most executives keep them on one list

The start is on paper. Once everyone who has heard about the decision in the last few weeks is written down, the names sort themselves into three groups.

• The one who knows: someone who understands a fact the decision rests on better than the executive does, such as a market, a number, or a legal or technical constraint.
• The one who carries: the person who will execute the decision and live with its result every day, often someone on the team.
• The one who soothes: someone with neither the knowledge nor the execution, whose conversation simply lightens the load.

All three are valuable. The trouble is that they get mixed up. When the one who soothes is treated like the one who knows, or the reverse, the executive ends up with a pile of opinions and no way to tell which answers which.

Why the one who soothes goes unnoticed

The one who soothes is often the best-loved adviser: close, trusted, outside the company, and not judging. After the conversation the decision has not moved, but the tension has dropped. A drop in tension produces the feeling that something has been decided. What was actually given is a breath, and it returns the next morning alongside the same decision. The comfort is real; what goes wrong is counting the relief as the decision.

The method orders what each person is asked for, not whom to ask

The method has three steps, and their order matters more than the steps themselves. First the conversations are labelled, then the one who knows gets a narrow question, and last the one who carries is brought into the room before the decision, not after it.

Labelling the conversations first

Each name on the list gets one word: knows, carries, or soothes. How the person describes themselves does not matter. What matters is what the executive changed after that conversation. If nothing changed, the conversation most likely belongs to the third group. The labelling takes about ten minutes and usually surprises the executive, because the third group is the longest.

A narrow question for the one who knows

The person who knows is not asked “what do you think.” They are asked the one thing the decision lacks: whether the market is really growing at this pace, whether the contract carries such a clause, whether the team can bear this load. A narrow question brings a narrow answer, and the answer fixes one variable in the decision. A wide question brings an opinion, and an opinion is a new share.

Bringing the one who carries in beforehand

The third step is the one most often skipped. The person who will execute is usually informed once the decision is made, though they know best under what conditions it could not be carried. Brought in beforehand, they both say something and take something on: their objection gets written into the decision. Talking to the one who soothes is not forbidden; keeping that conversation outside the decision round keeps it clear whose decision it is.

When the decision is reduced to one sentence, its owner becomes visible by name

After the three steps the decision is reduced to a single sentence the executive could say aloud, and the sentence begins with a subject: I. I have chosen this, I am letting go of that, and until this date I carry the result. If words like “we,” “as a team,” or “all together” remain in the sentence, the decision is still inside the loop.

An ownerless decision gets reopened

A decision whose owner cannot be seen sends the people executing it a message of its own: this can change. If nobody stands behind a decision alone, taking it back costs nobody anything. The team senses this and carries the decision out as a suggestion rather than a principle. When the same question is reopened two months later, no one is surprised, because the decision never closed. What closes a decision is not consensus but a named owner.

The question of intuition or data

This frame also gives the familiar question of intuition or data a different answer. Data is the contribution of the one who knows; its edge is clear, and it fixes one variable of the decision. Intuition is the executive's own reading of whether they can carry the result. The two are not alternatives. They answer different questions. Data narrows what is unknown, and intuition says whether the decision can be carried.

From the field

When an executive arrives asking how to make the right decision, our first job is to draw up the list of people they have talked to in recent weeks. The list is long, and its ordering says something too: the name that comes up most is usually not the one who knows or the one who carries, but the one who soothes. For most executives, the list is the first time they see whose mouths the decision has passed through.

What happens after the list

Once the labels are written, the conversation often changes. The executive says they already knew most of the decision, and that the only thing missing was a number or a clause in a contract. Sometimes they keep talking to the most frequent name but now know what that conversation stands in for, and that knowledge alone shortens the loop.

In an earlier piece on what makes a decision right we described rightness as a label applied afterwards; what this adds is that the owner of the decision goes missing while that label is being sought. For telling a real wait from a postponement in disguise, the executive who postpones decisions covers the other face of the same problem. More on clarity sits under Perspective.

How we work begins with this list. When the loop ends, what is left is not the decision but its owner, and only then can the decision be made.