Decision making shapes destiny. Every day, we’re faced with countless choices: what to wear, what to prioritize, which product feature to build. It might seem trivial, but each decision fuels action, momentum, and progress.
Yet many avoid decisions, saying “I don’t mind,” or asking others to choose, often due to underlying fears: fear of the unknown, hidden bias, emotional overload, or simply being overwhelmed. Surprisingly, deciding can ease overwhelm. Absence of decision causes paralysis, stalling not just you, but your team and business.
In this post, you’ll discover:
- Why decision-making is foundational: nothing happens without choice.
- Top reasons people struggle to decide: uncertainty, bias, anxiety, fatigue.
- Five proven decision frameworks that drive speed and clarity.
- When a decision isn’t needed: how to conserve mental bandwidth.
- How to improve: speed, intuition, data awareness, and coaching.
If you aim to lead, perform, or launch, understanding decision making will transform how you move forward. Let’s dive in.
Decision Making is the Root of all action
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions. Your life probably feels like an endless stream of decisions. Whether you’re deciding what outfit to wear, what to eat for breakfast, or what feature to add to your product. Decisions are a constant in life.
Many of us find creative ways to avoid decision making. From a simple “Doesn’t matter to me” to more elaborate “I’m actually away from my desk, can you decide?”.
You likely avoid decisions for all kinds of reasons: Fear, Bias, emotions, you name it, it is probably a good enough reason to avoid a decision. My personal favorite “I’m too overwhelmed to make a decision” even when the decision is what would relieve the overwhelm.
Without a decision, you cannot take action. The people around you cannot take action. This can leave you, your team, and your business in a state of paralysis. The longer that paralysis goes on, the longer you are stuck in one place.
Why Do Some People Struggle to Make Decisions?
Decision making is challenging. However, some people struggle more than others. It could be because they are scared, don’t like risk, or are worried about what other people may think.
Most of the time, those reasons can feel overwhelming. Lets take a look at the top reasons I’ve seen from my clients about why they struggle with decision making.
Fear of the Unknown (Uncertainty)
Uncertainty triggers our innate survival instincts. Our ancestors evolved to have a fear of uncertainty. They needed to know where water would come from, if dangerous animals were nearby, all to survive.
Today, that translates into anxiety around decisions when outcomes are unclear. That stress response can lead to:
- Increased disease susceptibility
- Disengagement from your life
- Burning out from increased stress.
Fear of the unknown drives you to delay your decision. Making your life miserable by waiting longer and longer.
Want to learn to deal with Uncertainty? Make Clear Decisions Amid Fear of the Unknown
Unnoticed Biases
Hidden cognitive biases distort our reasoning, often without us realizing. There are many biases that exist in the world but a few have an outsized impact in your work.
- Confirmation bias
- Anchoring
- Availability
- Recency
These biases generate blind spots that impede rational decision-making and erode trust when unchecked. Making sure that you notice your biases will make you a much stronger decision maker.
Learn more: Confirmation Bias & Cognitive Blind spots Every High Performer Should Know
Emotional Explosion
Intense emotions like fear, guilt, and anger can hijack logical thought processes. The emotional reaction centers of the brain are first to act. It becomes your responsibility to slow them down.
Without emotional regulation, decisions become reactionary or avoidant, not reasoned. Your team starts seeing you rushed and disorganized. Getting a hold of your emotional reactions is the best way to become a high performer.
Rather than letting your emotions govern your choices, you make good choices despite your emotions.
Learn how to be emotionally resilient during Decision Making
5 Frameworks for Making a Business Decision
The 5 frameworks below are well known decision frameworks. They are used to make more informed and faster decisions. Make sure you pick the right framework for your scenario.
Decision doors: For Decision Making Paralysis
A decision making structure popularized by Jeff Bezos where every decision can be thought of as being 1 of two types of decisions:
- One way doors: Where the decision is irreversible and very difficult to come back from. This requires a high amount of thought, review, and understanding before making the decision.
- Two way doors: Decisions that, with some effort, can be reversed. These decisions should be made quickly and be evaluated during execution rather than delaying action.
Most times, people treat all their decisions as one way doors. This overconsumes decision making energy and makes a person move incredibly slowly.
Being able to accurately identify which type of decision you are dealing with will make most decisions much easier. You will no longer be playing with massive stakes.
Eisenhauer Matrix: Decision Making For Team Leaders
The Eisenhauer matrix is used to help leaders decide how to spend their time. It can support leaders who feel like they need to do it all with pairing down their workload.
The matrix is divided into 4 primary sections: Do, Schedule, Delegate, Eliminate. Based on the level of urgency and importance, it makes both completing and deleting tasks simple.
Using a framework like the Eisenhauer matrix helps leaders to better manage their time without over committing themselves.
ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease): For Driving Change
The ICE framework, popularized by Sean Ellis, evaluates initiatives by scoring them across three dimensions: Impact, Confidence, and Ease (time/effort required). Each is rated 1–10 and multiplied to generate an ICE score:
- Impact: How much positive change will this drive?
- Confidence: How certain are you that it will work?
- Ease: How easy is it to implement?
By ranking ideas by ICE score, teams rapidly prioritize high-impact, low-effort, data-backed efforts. It’s a lightweight method that surfaces quick wins and aligns cross-functional teams.
ICE is a perfect framework when speed is most important. The simplicity of the framework allows teams to act quickly with a strong reason.
OODA Loop: For Data-Driven Decisions
The OODA Loop, coined by military strategist Colonel John Boyd, is a high-frequency decision cycle: Observe → Orient → Decide → Act, then repeat.
- Observe: Gather real-time data.
- Orient: Contextualize it using trends, culture, team intuition.
- Decide: Pick the best option based on the current dataset.
- Act: Execute quickly and re-enter the loop to refine.
Rapid iteration helps businesses stay agile and consistently ahead of changing conditions.
The OODA loop is best used for making data driven decisions under time constraints. Leaders often use the OODA loop to bring together vast datasets, identify gaps, and make informed decisions to move forward.
S.P.A.D.E: For Organizational Decision Making
The S.P.A.D.E framework breaks decisions into five key components:
- S: Situation – Define what’s happening now.
- P: Problem – Articulate the core challenge or question.
- A: Alternatives – List potential paths forward.
- D: Decide – Choose by weighing criteria like outcomes, risks.
- E: Execute/Evaluate – Implement rapidly and assess results.
This system offers clarity across all decision stages, ensuring teams ground choices in context and stay aligned from problem definition through execution.
The S.P.A.D.E works well when leaders need input from multiple stakeholders. Giving your team a chance to voice their concerns, ideas for solutions, and being a part of the decision framework makes driving change simpler.
When a Decision isn’t actually Necessary
Some decisions don’t require deliberate choice in fact, treating them as though they do can drain mental energy and clutter the path forward.
When Your Environment Leaves No Room for Interpretation
In some workflows and systems, the correct action is built into the process. Treating procedural steps or automated workflows as decisions not only wastes executive capacity, but also accelerates decision fatigue, reducing mental clarity for truly strategic decisions
So instead of relying on Willpower to help you make the right decision, focus on your environment. The highest performers reduce the number of mundane decisions they make so they can focus on the high leverage decisions. The decisions that don’t come up everyday.
Focus on setting up your environment so good decisions are obvious and bad decisions are hidden.
Relying on Willpower? Think Again. Why Willpower Fails in Decision Making
How to Improve Your Decision Making
Speed of Decision making matters
Making fast decisions is the largest leverage point in your life. It is possible to move 24X or even 100X faster. All you need to do is make faster decisions.
Making decisions allows you to action. From those actions, you learn. From those learnings, you can make better decisions because you know more than you did on the first decision.
High performers use decision making are their super power. They move faster than others because they decide and act 10 times before you even make a single decision. This makes them learn faster, perform better, and increase their output.
Read more: Why Fast Decisions are the Best Decisions
Trusting Your Gut
Decisions made with your gut are loosely based on the concept of intuition.
Intuition is the amount of experience someone has in a similar situation to be able to better predict the outcomes of your actions. That means you can have a highly intuitive knowledge in one area, while in another you are not intuitive at all.
During time sensitive decisions, be sure to pick the person with the most experience with the problem. Their intuitive understanding will be much stronger.
Knowing When You can’t Collect More Data
The highest performers understand that there is a limit to how much data you can collect. No decision is made with a perfect dataset. The skill of knowing how much data is enough data is key in high level decision makers.
The level of data needed to make a decision varies. Some decisions are low risk enough that minimal data will do. Others will require much more information. Finding the data sweet spot allows you to make defensible and quick decisions.
Searching for the Truth, not Being Right
Leaders often want to be right. So much so that it can cloud their judgment.
For example: Leaders often assume their customers should have a base level knowledge to use their product. Rather than listening to their customer, who is telling them the product is too complex, they respond with more processes for them to follow.
The best leaders understand that it is more important to win than it is to be right. When a customer tells them the product is bad, they listen. Putting their ego to the side and winning.
The Cost of Indecision
An often overlooked aspect of decision making. The cost of sitting around while waiting for a decision needs to be made.
Indecision is the heaviest weight for a team to bear. While you deliberate on a decision, your team twiddles their thumbs. Not knowing where to spend their time to best move things forward. Every extra hour you take to make a decision can be 10, 20 even 30 hours of your team’s time waiting.
The costs of indecision can pile up: Check out the ways Indecision is costing you
Coaching for High Caliber decision making
Coaches are experts in helping you make decisions. A coach’s responsibility is to help you reveal the problem, your biases, fears, and translate all of those into action. Executive coaches are expertly trained to support high level decision making and push things forward.
You coach can help you:
- Look at your decision from a new perspective
- Clarify your fear, rational, and discover new emotional connections
- Reveal the best decision for you based on your outlook
Decision making is challenging, you shouldn’t have to do it alone. Find a coach today.
