Making meaningful decisions pretty often sucks.
Not just what to have for dinner… though that has its moments, too… but real ones with real implications. What business priorities should I focus on? Which strategic direction will move my business forward? What job should I take?
At the beginning of that process, it can actually feel pretty great. We’re surrounded by compelling options. Exciting ideas for where to focus the business, new markets to explore, or opportunities to change employers. There’s a certain thrill to imagining all the possibilities in front of us, each one representing a different version of a future we might want.
There is possibility everywhere!
But then we have to start seriously considering our decisions. We begin to recognize the limits of not only the information we have, but the information we could possibly acquire. We imagine incredible futures for each of our options, unconstrained by all the unknowns we’re certain to encounter when we actually commit to one. It’s easy to fall in love with a hypothetical future when it hasn’t yet had the opportunity to disappoint us.
And that’s where things get uncomfortable.
Keeping Both Pots Warm
Some of us are inclined to keep kicking the ball down the field. Keeping both irons in the fire. Or perhaps more appropriately, trying to boil two pots on one burner. We split our time, attention, and resources between competing possibilities, sometimes reducing the likelihood of either succeeding because neither gets the heat it needs to boil.
Eventually, we have to push one pot onto the burner and let the other cool. But here’s the thing: we don’t necessarily have to do that yet.
Sometimes keeping both pots warm is exactly the right decision. Maybe we’re not sure which one we’ll need for dinner. Maybe we’re waiting for information that could change our plans. Maybe a friend will show up with fresh lobsters and suddenly that enormous pot makes perfect sense. We simply can’t know!
And that’s okay. We can shuffle the pots back and forth for a while, giving each enough heat to keep our options alive while we figure out what we’re actually cooking. In fact, we probably should.
Because there’s a difference between committing to an outcome and committing to the process of understanding our options.
We can investigate, ask questions, test assumptions, and learn things that challenge what we thought we knew. We don’t have to choose a direction simply because we’ve started exploring it. An interview isn’t a commitment to accepting a job, any more than running an experiment is a commitment to adopting a strategy. Sometimes those smaller commitments are precisely what allow us to make better-informed decisions later.
But we do have to recognize when the moment of commitment actually arrives. Choosing before that moment is its own commitment: a decision to forgo information that might have helped us make a better one.
Preserving More Than the Idea
And there’s another kind of premature commitment that’s easier to miss. Sometimes we think we’re keeping an option open simply because we haven’t explicitly ruled it out. But an option doesn’t remain available just because we haven’t said no. If we’re not doing the work to explore it, we may not be preserving the option at all. We might just be preserving the idea of it.
Consider an interview we never attend, an experiment we never run, or a conversation we keep putting off. Each represents an opportunity to learn something that could change our understanding of the choices in front of us. Yet by declining to participate, we allow that uncertainty to persist. We tell ourselves we haven’t made a decision, even as our actions begin narrowing the possibilities available to us.
While the Decision Is Still Ours
And the world doesn’t stop moving while we deliberate. Opportunities change, doors close, and circumstances evolve. The alternative we assumed would still be there when we were ready might disappear long before we ever get around to deciding whether we wanted it.
Of course, we can’t investigate every possibility forever. Gathering information has its own costs, and eventually the value of learning something new becomes smaller than the cost of continuing to wait. There will always be things we cannot know until we’ve committed, and others we may never know at all. The goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty, but to understand enough to make a reasonable decision while that decision is still ours to make.
In the face of uncertainty, perhaps the most important commitment we can make is to keep learning while we still have the opportunity.
Because sometimes the decision isn’t whether to take one path or another. Sometimes it’s whether we’re willing to find out where the other path leads.
