Two years without a single decision. Why boards look for data instead of deciding

I come back to that story every time I hear, in a strategy workshop, “before we decide, let's check one more thing”. Because the problem almost never lies in the data. It lies in what happens at the table once the data is there and the decision still isn't.

Let's start with something easy to say and hard to accept: more data won't buy you certainty. If data could, you wouldn't need a strategy at all. An action plan and a good project manager would do. Strategy exists precisely because we act under uncertainty. It's a set of bets on how we get from here to where we want to be, made on what we know today.

Second: the market doesn't wait with you. A decision you ponder for two years is usually out of date after two years. Waiting is a choice too, only nobody formally made it. It's not in the minutes, nobody signed it, and the consequences are exactly like those of a decision: for two years the company went somewhere, except nobody chose where.

What really happens in a board like that

In my experience it's rarely a matter of analysis and more often a matter of courage. I say this to myself as well: as a CEO I know how tempting one more analysis instead of a decision can be. Analysis doesn't hurt. A decision does, because it closes other roads. At least for this iteration.

I've watched it in workshops for twenty years and it always looks alike. The board has data, sometimes very good data. It also has three versions of where the company is going, one per board member, and nobody has said them out loud. “One more analysis” is then the safest sentence in the room: nobody has to agree, nobody has to refuse anyone, everyone leaves feeling they worked on the strategy.

Escaping a decision has more faces than the search for data. One is silent agreement: in the workshop everyone says “yes”, and half of them think “we'll survive this and carry on as before”. Another is hiding goals in the company's health metrics: instead of deciding what we invest in, we write “keep the margin” next to “enter a new market” and pretend the two don't collide. A third is a two-hundred-page document of analyses the company calls a strategy. It isn't one. Strategy is the conclusions from the analyses, and conclusions fit on one page.

What to do about it this quarter

The paradox is that deciding fast and iterating gives more peace of mind than waiting. Because you know what you're testing, how you'll recognise a mistake and when you'll return to the topic. A postponed decision gives no peace. It only gives deferred stress.

So instead of another analysis I suggest three things for the coming quarter. First, one decision, not five: the one it's hardest to live without. Second, the assumptions behind it written down, because only then can you check which one didn't hold. Third, a gate: a metric, a date and an amount after which you say “go on” or “stop”. A board with a gate stops fearing decisions, because it knows it's betting a quarter, not the company.

The worst thing is not to decide. And by the way, OKRs are a great way to iterate a strategy.