What if there is no right decision?

A decision is due. It matters, the consequences reach far, and that is exactly why it doesn’t get made. Instead: one more analysis, one more round, one more night to sleep on it.

I see this, or something close to it, in a lot of companies, across industries and across sizes. The pattern underneath is always the same: it might be the wrong decision.

What if the one right decision doesn’t exist in the first place?

Not in the sense of “it doesn’t matter”. Rather: for your organisation, in your situation, with the information on the table today, there are usually several workable paths, and none that can prove itself the right one in advance.

The perfection trap

We make roughly 20,000 decisions a day. That’s something I read once; where, I no longer remember. The number isn’t the point either. The point is that we decide constantly, and accountability still breaks down in organisations exactly where it counts.

The reason sits deep. From an early age we sort decisions into right and wrong. That sorting creates a fear of the wrong one, and the fear creates hesitation. Not with every decision. Reliably, though, with the ones that hurt: the ones that can cost money, affect people, or touch your own credibility. The search for the optimal decision mostly triggers the mental movie of the worst possible outcome.

The way out starts with a different question. Not: which decision is the right one? But: which one am I making, and seeing through with full conviction? Regards to the perfectionists.

Two types, both expensive

Most leadership teams hold two types, and both come at a cost.

The fast decider picks quickly and creates movement. But he never looks back. He doesn’t reflect on his decisions, doesn’t learn from them, and repeats the same mistake in a new disguise. His price is quality.

The participative decider wants everyone on board and listens to every voice. The meetings drag on, a conclusion never comes. At some point patience runs out, and in the end the call gets made alone after all, against every ideal of participation. What’s left is quiet resistance in the team. His price is speed.

The way out isn’t a tool, it’s a frame

Accountability isn’t a value. It’s a practice. You can’t put it on a poster, you can only rehearse it, and decisions are where that happens.

The frame for it is a decision charter: not the detailed question of who is responsible for what, but rough guardrails the team stays nimble within. A handful of shared rules for how decisions get made here. Nothing more.

Deciding by situation

Before any decision that matters, four questions help: Is this business- or time-critical? Familiar ground or new terrain? What experience do the people involved bring? Is the information you need on the table?

The first question is the one most often answered wrongly. Business-critical doesn’t mean “important”. Otherwise everything is business-critical. Business-critical means: if we get this wrong, it costs us a customer, a margin, or a year we don’t get back. Time-critical means: the window is closing, whether or not we are ready. Everything else tolerates more participation than you’d assume.

The answers point to the method, from “I decide alone and communicate” to “the team decides, I facilitate”. A tool like Delegation Poker (Management 3.0) makes this explicit in a few minutes, instead of leaving it vague.

Then a simple three-step holds: Decide – Execute – Adjust. Decide with nerve. Execute with resolve. Reflect and adjust what doesn’t hold. A decision isn’t a verdict, it’s an opening move.

Learning from decisions

This is where the fast deciders lose the most: they make plenty of decisions and never look back. A simple decision log closes the gap. What was decided, by which method, on what assumption? After three months you see patterns that stay invisible in the daily grind, and your next decision gets better, not just faster.

The usual advice is wrong here

When decisions descend into chaos, the standard remedy is: clear responsibilities, ideally a RACI matrix. I advise the opposite, and I’ve seen it in enough leadership teams to be sure about it.

Briefly, why. A responsibility matrix answers the question “who is allowed to?”. The real question in a leadership team is “how do we decide?”. The first is a question of power, the second a question of work. The moment you start allocating cells, you are negotiating power: every row becomes something to bargain over, the alignment drags on for weeks, and it ties up exactly the people who should be deciding during that time. By the time it’s signed off, the result is usually out of date, because the organisation has moved on. That’s why the matrix ends up in a drawer.

A few shared rules have the opposite effect. They’re agreed in a single session, they survive reorganisations, and they don’t make the leader smaller. They make them faster. Clarity isn’t soft. It’s the hardest growth measure you can take in a leadership team.

One leadership team I worked with scheduled a meeting for every bigger question and then postponed it, “to bring everyone along”. Three open decisions dragged on for weeks. When the team introduced a simple charter (three decision types, each with one method), the first of them fell in twenty minutes. Not because everyone got braver, but because it was clear how decisions get made.

What happens when the log thinks along

That very rhythm of deciding, executing and following through is the first thing to break down in a packed working day. Not out of negligence, but because the following-through is work that belongs to no one.

So for JUSTGROW I built a small AI agent together with millionsteps that takes on exactly that work. It keeps the decision log and surfaces the charter again when it’s needed. I can ask it: what did we decide on pricing last quarter? By which method? And when did we change our minds again, on what grounds? The answer comes in seconds, history included.

It gets interesting at the point where it stops being my tool.

In almost every company the same question travels the corridors: which quarterly priorities did the executive team actually agree, and where do they stand right now? Today the answer is a chain. The team member asks her team lead, who asks the division head, and eventually something comes back. That takes days, sometimes weeks, and the message shifts along the way.

With a maintained decision log behind an agent, she asks it herself. She gets what was decided, when, and on what assumption, without knocking on her boss’s door and without anyone building a deck for it. Automate the filing, and a decision is available to the whole company the moment the minutes of the meeting are written.

This isn’t an efficiency story. It’s a leadership one. Transparency about decisions is the precondition for people pulling with you. It has simply kept failing on the effort involved. That effort has just disappeared.

This week

Write your next three pending decisions on one line each: what, who decides, by when. You don’t need more charter than that to start. The rest you’ll see when you look back in four weeks.

And if you already keep a decision log: take the next step. Put it somewhere an agent can read it, and let your team ask for themselves instead of escalating. If you don’t keep one yet, start with the three lines. The technology will wait.

Where you stand as a leadership team, and where decisions are really stuck, is what we clarify in a Standortgespräch or, more structured, through the Standortbestimmung. Over a full quarter we work on it in the Growth Program and in the Growth Circles.

Frequently asked questions

What do you do when there is no right decision?

Change the question. Not "which decision is the right one?" but "which one do I make, and then implement with full commitment?". For most situations there are several workable paths and none that can be proven right beforehand. A decision is not a verdict, it is a first move.

Why do leaders hesitate on important decisions?

Because we sort decisions into right and wrong from childhood on. That sorting produces fear of the wrong one, and the fear produces hesitation, reliably on the decisions that cost money, affect people or touch your own credibility. Searching for the optimal decision mostly triggers the mental film of the worst consequences.

What is a decision charter?

A handful of shared rules for how the leadership team decides. Not a detailed list of responsibilities, but broad guard rails inside which the team stays mobile. It is agreed in a single session and survives reorganisations. One team that defined three decision types with one method each resolved its first open question in twenty minutes.

Does a RACI matrix help against decision chaos?

Usually not. A responsibility matrix answers "who is allowed to?", while the real question in a leadership team is "how do we decide?". One is a question of power, the other a question of work. Once you start allocating cells, every row becomes a negotiation, alignment drags on for weeks and ties up exactly the people who should be deciding in that time. By sign-off the result is already out of date.

How does a leadership team learn from its decisions?

Through a simple decision log: what was decided, by which method, on which assumption. After three months it reveals patterns that day-to-day work hides. This is where fast decision-makers lose the most: they make many decisions and never look back.