The Danger of Half-Decisions

What "Modernize and Execute" Actually Told the Team

I worked on a program kicked off with the line "modernize and execute." Two words. No priority. No tradeoff. No theory of what came first or what came second. It sounded like a decision because it was said with confidence. It was a half-decision because it left the actual choice to whoever was downstream.

The team translated. Each sub-team picked a meaning that fit their part of the work. Some picked modernization. Some picked execution. Most picked their own current backlog and labeled it whichever word made the sponsor happy that week. The activity stayed high. The ROI never showed up. The reason was not effort. The reason was that a real choice had not been made, so the team chose for the leader, and the choices did not add up to a coherent thing.

When the program slipped, the postmortem pointed at the team. The team was not the problem. The problem was at the top, and it had been a half-decision the whole time.

The Five Number Ones Problem

A close cousin of the half-decision is the five number ones problem. Every business function arrives at the room with their thing and explains why it has to be first. Sales has the demo on Tuesday. Compliance has the audit on Thursday. Legal has the filing next week. Marketing has the campaign launch. Each one has a real reason. Each one is correct.

A leader who cannot tell four of those people no walks out of the room with five priority ones. Five number ones is zero number ones. The team that has to deliver against that list does not deliver. The team picks one and does it well, picks two more and does them poorly, and quietly drops the rest. The dropped ones blow up later, usually on the people who had been told they were a priority.

A half-decision often hides as politeness. The leader did not want to say no in front of the room. The cost of avoiding the no shows up two weeks later, in the work that did not get done.

What a Real Decision Looks Like

A real decision has three properties. It names what is first. It names what is not. It tells the team what to start, stop, and continue.

That is it. The decision does not have to be popular. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to come with a long deck. It has to leave the team with less ambiguity than they had before the decision was made.

The other test of a real decision is whether somebody finds out their thing was not first. If nobody finds out, the decision was probably not real. The leader explained around the choice rather than making it. Real decisions show up because somebody on the receiving end is unhappy. That is not a failure. That is the cost of choosing.

The Build Versus Buy That Proved the Point

Years ago at State Farm I sat in on a build-versus-buy decision for an aging claims system. The leadership had to decide whether to redesign internally or buy an external solution. Requirements were unclear. Vendors were unknown. The conversation could have ended in a half-decision easily. There were enough unknowns that "let's keep both options open" would have sounded like wisdom.

The team did the work instead. We sat with business and systems partners and defined current functionality and future needs. We worked with Indirect Purchasing to qualify vendors. We issued an RFP. We used Kepner-Tregoe weighted scoring to compare options on the same criteria. We structured demos around a standardized questionnaire so the comparisons were apples to apples. We coordinated NDAs through legal.

The recommendation was internal build. The reason was clear. The decision was clear. Leadership had a documented basis. The business partners got the specialized processing they needed. Everybody walked out of the room with the same understanding of what had been chosen and why.

That is what a real decision looks like in practice. It is not faster than a half-decision in the moment. It is much faster over the next year, because nobody has to translate.

The Mentor Who Taught Me Decisions Create Pace

The leader who taught me how to decide was JB, a retired Navy Captain turned program director I worked for years ago. Every effort I worked on with him had pace. The team knew which way they were going. Open questions did not pile up because he closed them as they came. He made decisions with the data he had at the moment. If new data showed up later that changed the picture, he would say so and reset. The reset cost a small amount. Living with an open question for two weeks cost much more.

Decisions create pace. The work waits while the decision is open. The work moves once the decision is closed. That is the first lesson he taught me.

The second lesson, which I have made my own, is about who should make the call. Decisions belong at the lowest level where the most data lives. If a decision is tactical, the people doing the work have more data than I do, so they should decide. If a decision is strategic, I have more data than they do, so I should decide. Pushing the strategic calls down creates churn. Pulling the tactical calls up creates bottlenecks. The leader's job is to figure out which kind of decision is in front of them and route it to the level where it can be made cleanly.

A leader who routes decisions correctly creates pace at every level. The decisions get made by the people closest to the data. The leader spends their time on the small number of calls only they can make.

The opposite of JB's pattern is a leader who makes the team escalate every decision. That is also a decision, even though it does not feel like one. Pulling every call up to the leader slows the work, because the team waits at every step. It also sends a message the team will hear clearly. I do not trust your judgment. I do not value your experience. Most teams will accept that message exactly once. Then they will start making the small calls quietly, so they do not have to escalate them. The leader who tried to keep everything visible has now made the work invisible.

Why Leaders Avoid the Call

Half-decisions happen for human reasons. The hardest one to see is that not deciding is itself a decision. If a leader waits long enough, the opportunity passes, the choice gets made by circumstance, and the cost is paid anyway. The leader who avoided the discomfort of choosing did not avoid the choice. They made a worse version of it.

Three reasons leaders avoid the call show up over and over.

I have done versions of all three. The first one is the one I have to watch myself on most. The team is behind schedule on a date they did not commit to. We are not going to make it. I need to tell them they have to work the weekend, or I need to tell the executive the date will not hold, or both. I do not want to be the bad guy in either room. So I delay. The team works late on their own because they can read the gap. I have not said anything yet, which keeps me out of the bad-guy seat in the moment and costs the team a worse weekend than if I had named it on Tuesday.

The fix is not bravery. The fix is to make the decision small enough to be made. If you cannot decide which entire program comes first, decide what gets the next two weeks. If you cannot decide what gets the next two weeks, decide what gets tomorrow. Real decisions stack. Half-decisions accumulate as confusion.

The next time you walk out of a room thinking you made a decision, check the team. If they ask one question and you give one answer, you decided. If they ask one question and you give two answers, you half-decided. The cost of that gap is the work the team will do over the next month trying to figure out what you actually meant. Save them that month by choosing.