On the slow, expensive work of choosing what you already know
There is a kind of tree, common in the woods around here, that will die slowly from the inside without anyone noticing until it comes down in a storm. The bark looks healthy. The leaves come in most years. But the heart of it has been rotting for a long time, and the damage was done by a decision the owner kept meaning to make — to cut it, to treat it, to call someone who would know — and kept putting off because the tree still looked fine, and the work still felt premature, and the other things were louder.
I have watched this happen in a great many organizations too. The avoided decision is the slow rot. It does not announce itself. It does not show up on a report. It reveals itself, finally, in the storm, when the tree comes down and takes the fence with it, and everyone says how sudden it was, and nobody says that it had been dying for years.
“The decisions you do not make are making you, and they are making the organization, whether you give them permission to or not.”
What is actually being avoided
In almost every case I have seen, the decision itself is not the thing being avoided. The decision is simple. The answer is usually clear, and has been for some time. What is being avoided is the consequence of the decision — the conversation with the person you like who is not performing, the disappointment of the stakeholder who expected something different, the admission that an earlier bet did not pay off, the end of a season you were hoping would turn around if you gave it just a little more time.
Leaders do not avoid decisions because the decisions are hard. They avoid them because the consequences are personally costly, and postponing the decision postpones the consequence. That is true until it is not — until the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of the consequence, and by then, the bill has grown in ways that cannot be undone.
Scripture is candid about this pattern. “Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1, KJV). The assumption that tomorrow is a safer place to make a decision than today is one of the most expensive illusions in leadership. Tomorrow is almost never safer. Tomorrow usually comes with fewer options and a tighter frame, because today’s avoidance has narrowed it.
The interest rate on a delayed decision
A few years ago I sat with a business owner in East Texas who was wrestling with whether to close a location that had been losing money for eighteen months. He had the data. He had the conversations. He had the private conviction that it needed to happen. But every quarter he found a reason to wait — the season was about to change, the new manager might turn it around, the holidays were coming, he owed it to the long-time employees to try one more thing.
By the time he finally closed the location, he had spent nearly a year of cash reserves he did not get back. More expensively, he had lost the trust of his strongest manager at another location, who had watched the whole thing and concluded, quietly, that her boss could not be counted on to make hard calls. She left six months later. The location closing cost him money. The delay cost him a leader. He has told me more than once that the second cost was much worse than the first.
This is the shape of avoided decisions in leadership. The cost is rarely the decision. The cost is always the delay, and the delay compounds in currencies — trust, credibility, the quiet respect of the people watching — that do not show up on any balance sheet and cannot be bought back.
“The people watching you are taking notes. What you tolerate teaches them what you value.”
Three disciplines for moving on what you have been avoiding
Name the real thing
Sit down with a blank page. Not on a screen — a page. Write this sentence. “I am avoiding this decision because if I make it, I will have to ____.” Finish it honestly. If the first answer is abstract, try again until it is specific. The answer is almost never, “because I do not have enough information.” The answer is almost always, “because I will have to tell someone something I do not want to tell them,” or “because I will have to admit I was wrong about something,” or “because I will have to close a door I was hoping would stay open.”
Once you have written the real answer, look at it. The reason you have been avoiding the decision is almost always recognizable as a cost you can actually bear, set against a delay cost you probably cannot.
Calculate the delay cost, not just the decision cost
Ask the question that is rarely asked. “If I do nothing for ninety more days, what will it have cost me?” Not only in money. In trust. In optionality. In the moral credibility of your leadership in the eyes of people who are watching more closely than you realize. Write the number down. Write the names down. That calculation, done honestly, almost always ends the avoidance.
Ecclesiastes, in its unvarnished way, says, “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11, KJV). The verse is talking about moral consequence, but the principle carries into leadership. A delayed decision signals, to everyone watching, that there will not be a decision. Behavior adjusts accordingly. The longer you wait, the more calibration you will have to undo when you finally act.
Set a date and tell one person
Avoided decisions thrive in the private interior of the leader’s head. Bring one into the light by committing to a date — not a discussion date, a decision date — and telling one trusted person. A spouse. A peer. An advisor. A member of your board. Not to ask permission. To create a witness.
Ecclesiastes again, a verse often quoted at weddings but relevant here: “Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, KJV). A witness is not a crutch. A witness is what keeps a date from sliding quietly into another delay. The trusted person’s only job is to ask, on the morning of the date you committed to, whether the decision was made. You will find it harder to slide past a human being than past a note in your calendar.
Leadership Reflection
• What is the decision in your organization right now that has been pending longer than it should have been? What consequence are you actually avoiding?
• What has this delay cost you in the last ninety days that you have not yet named out loud?
• If you had to commit, this week, to a decision date in the next thirty days, what date would it be, and who would you tell?
• What are the people watching you learning, quietly, about what you are willing to do and what you are not?
The relief on the far side
There is a particular quality to the peace that comes after an avoided decision has finally been made. It is not the peace of getting what you wanted. Often the decision is costly, and the aftermath is hard, and there is grief to move through. But underneath the grief is a peace that does not come any other way. It is the peace of a leader who has stopped carrying something they were never meant to carry that long.
I have watched leaders, in the weeks after finally making the call, describe the experience in almost physical terms. They sleep better. They think more clearly. Their families notice a shift they cannot quite name. The decision cost them something. The decision also gave them something back — a part of themselves the avoidance had been quietly eroding.
Whatever tree in your organization has been dying slowly from the inside, this is the week to walk out and look at it honestly. Not because acting is easy. Because the storm is coming, and a tree you take down on your own terms is a very different thing from a tree that takes the fence with it.
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A note from Lee: If any of this lands where you are right now, and you would value an unhurried conversation with someone whose job is to help you see clearly, the door is open. connect.msgresources.com/leadership-advisory
