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. The feeling underneath is always the same. It might be the wrong one.

What if there is no right decision in the first place?

The perfection trap

We make roughly 20,000 decisions a day. And yet accountability breaks down in organizations 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. The search for the optimal decision mostly triggers the mental movie of the worst possible outcome.

The way out is a reframe: it’s not about making the perfect decision. It’s about making one — and seeing it through with full conviction.

Two failure patterns

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 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. In most cases I advise the opposite. A detailed responsibility matrix mostly generates arguments about power and then lands, unused, in a drawer. What leadership teams need isn’t more cells in a table, but a few shared rules and the discipline to apply them.

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.

That very rhythm of deciding, executing and following through is the first thing to break down in a packed working day. At millionsteps we build small AI agents for exactly that — keeping the decision log and surfacing the charter again at the right moment.

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.

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.