The decision you keep not making is the most expensive thing you own

Every small team I have run has carried one item that cost more than any salary on the books, and it never appeared on the books at all. It was the decision we kept not making.

You know the one. It comes up in the Monday meeting and somebody says we should probably sort that out, and everybody nods, because nodding is free and sorting it out is not. It comes up again the week after, slightly heavier, because now it has history. By the third week it has become a sort of furniture. People walk around it. New starters are quietly taught to walk around it too, and nobody remembers that it was once a simple fork in the road that a single person could have closed in an afternoon.

The reason it survives is that an unmade decision feels safe. Nothing has been lost yet. No door has shut. But that is an illusion, and an expensive one, because the cost of the unmade decision is not in the future, it is being paid right now, every day, in the small tax of everyone holding two possibilities open in their head at once. A team that has not decided which way the thing goes is a team doing double the thinking and half the work, and it cannot tell you why it feels so tired.

I used to believe my job was to make the right call. I no longer think that is the job, or not most of it. Most of the job is to make the call at all, and soon, and out loud, so that the dozen small plans quietly waiting on it can finally move. A good decision made on Tuesday beats a perfect one made at the end of the month, because the perfect one has been charging rent the whole time.

The trick I use now is almost embarrassingly plain. When something has come up twice and gone nowhere, I give it an owner and a date before the meeting ends, and the owner is one named person, not the team, because the team is nobody. The date is close, because a far date is just a slower way of not deciding. And I say plainly that we may get it wrong, and that getting it wrong on Thursday and fixing it on Friday is cheaper than being uncertain for a fortnight. That last part matters most. People do not avoid decisions because they are lazy. They avoid them because they are afraid of being wrong, and the only cure for that fear is a culture that treats a reversible mistake as the ordinary price of moving.

So if you want one thing to do on Monday, walk the floor of your own team and find the thing everyone is walking around. Then close it. You will be amazed how much the room weighs the moment you do.

Meetings are often where those decisions go to hide, which is why Meetings That End designs every meeting backwards from the decision it has to produce.