Week 6 Day 7: Assignment: Make One Decision You Have Been Avoiding

You have one. Every leader does. A hiring decision, a priority call, a difficult conversation, a structural change you know needs to happen. Something you have been sitting on because the timing is not perfect or the data is not complete or you are not sure how it will land. Pick one. Make the call this week.

Here is the process. First, write down the decision and the two or three options you have been weighing. Second, for each option, list the strongest argument in its favor and the biggest risk. Third, write down what would need to be true for you to reverse the decision in 30 days -- your falsification criteria from Day 5. Fourth, pick the option with the best risk-adjusted argument and communicate it to the affected people. Use this format: 'I have decided to [X]. Here is why: [reasoning]. Here is what I considered: [alternatives]. Here is how we will know if this was wrong: [criteria]. I will revisit this on [date].' That is it. The communication framework takes five minutes to prepare and eliminates 80% of the anxiety around the decision. Most of the dread comes from ambiguity -- once you structure the decision, the call becomes obvious. This exercise closes out Part I of the course. For the first six weeks, we have been working on your inner game: self-awareness, Working Genius, servant leadership, path-clearing, humility. Starting in Week 7, we begin applying these foundations to how you interact with your team specifically.

Research on decision avoidance by Anderson (2003) identifies three primary drivers of postponement in leaders: anticipated regret (fear of making the wrong choice), choice difficulty (options are too close to differentiate), and accountability stress (visibility of the outcome). Anderson's experimental data shows that providing leaders with a structured decision framework -- including explicit criteria for reversibility -- reduces decision avoidance by 40-60%. The 30-day revisit commitment is adapted from Jeff Bezos' distinction between 'Type 1' and 'Type 2' decisions. Type 1 decisions are irreversible and require careful analysis. Type 2 decisions are reversible and should be made quickly by empowered individuals. Bezos argues that most organizational decisions are Type 2 but get treated as Type 1, resulting in unnecessary slowness. By explicitly committing to a revisit date, you convert a psychologically Type 1 decision into a functionally Type 2 decision -- you create a formal escape hatch that reduces the stakes. Research by Kahneman and Tversky on loss aversion explains why this matters: people weigh potential losses roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains, making decision-makers systematically biased toward inaction. The structured framework directly counteracts this bias.