Frozen by Indecision? Here's How to Get Over It

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Divya Jeevan Sahoo

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Dec 26, 2005, 7:52:54 AM12/26/05

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Frozen by Indecision? Here's How to Get Over It

By Michael Masterson

You have been hashing over the problem for weeks. If you don't make a decision soon, you will miss the opportunity to solve it. You've narrowed your options down to two choices. But you can't figure out which one is better. What do you do?

Here's what I do:

1. Resist the urge to decide immediately.

If you are like me, you like to "get rid of" problems by solving them right away. Sometimes, that's good. Sometimes, it's too soon. Although my habit of making quick decisions has improved my business intuition, I have learned to moderate it by asking myself three questions:

When does this need to be decided upon?
What are the consequences of making the wrong choice? (How important will it be to me in 5 years?)
If the consequences aren't that important, why am I making the decision? (Is there someone else who can do it?)

2. Don't procrastinate.

If the decision carries with it important consequences, then you must commit to gathering the facts, asking the advice, and weighing the outcomes. But if you set a decision deadline ... keep it.

3. Gather the critical facts.

You don't need to know everything about a problem or opportunity to make a smart decision, but you do at least need to know the most important facts. Begin by writing down the critical questions. Then get answers for them. Then consider the risks and rewards implied by those answers.

4. Seek helpful advice.

Even if you are the world's leading authority on the topic at hand, it's still a good idea to get advice. Present your research. Explain your thinking. Ask the obvious questions. And listen open-mindedly to the answers. You may not hear anything that will change your mind, but even the experience of gathering data that confirms your point of view is valuable.

5. Do it!

If you follow this simple protocol, most decisions will be easy to make. But sometimes, even after going through this process, you will still be stymied. You will have two choices ... but they will both seem equal in terms of risks and rewards. What do you do then?

When I have a partner in the situation and we each have good reasons for taking a different course (and we can't come to a conclusion by discussion), I ask him: "How strongly do you feel about this?" If one of us feels more strongly than the other, I go with that stronger feeling.

When I don't have a partner to help me decide, I ask someone whose judgment I trust what they would do. (Usually, this is K.) Here's the interesting thing about asking someone else to decide for you. Often, just after they've rendered their verdict, you will have a momentary reaction to their advice, good or bad. Now you have a choice. You can listen to your intuition ... or you can simply follow the advice without further question. The main thing to remember at this point is to not extend your indecision any further.

Sometimes, we have trouble making decisions because the choices are really equal. In such cases, the decisions are merely arbitrary. For arbitrary decisions, I use arbitrary methods. Usually, I toss a coin. But sometimes, I use "eeny, meeny, miney, mo."

This is not as loony as it may seem. There was a great piece in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago that illustrates my point.

A Japanese company wanted to sell off its Impressionist art collection. Both Sotheby's and Christie's had put in similar bids. There was virtually no difference between them. So the corporate head did what some Japanese businessmen have always done in similar situations: He challenged the contenders to fight it out ... with a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. (See It's Good to Know, below.)

I'm not making this up. The company is called Maspro, and the chief executive who ordered the playoff is named Hashiyama. You can look it up.

When the auction companies realized that all their hard work (they'd spent tens of thousands putting together their presentations) was going to be superseded by a game of luck, they weren't happy. But Rock, Paper, Scissors isn't entirely a game of luck. In fact, there are dozens of treatises written on the subject, most about strategy.

Christie's executives took the challenge seriously and did plenty of research during the time between the announcement, a Friday, and the playoff, the following Monday. Their preparation paid off. When it came down to it, they picked scissors and Sotheby's picked paper. If you've ever played the game, you know: Scissors cuts paper.

Mr. Hashiyama was able to rationalize the casualness of his decision-making technique because he couldn't go wrong with either choice. "I believe this is the best way to decide between two things which are equally good," Hashiyama said. And this may be the key to knowing when a random decision could work just as well as a carefully researched and thoughtful one.

Are the available options equal? Will they have equal consequences? If the options are uneven, then your decision should be easy. It's usually when the choices are uniformly bad or good that indecision becomes a problem. And this is a time when arbitrary decision-making strategies come in handy.

Arbitrary decisions, like well-considered ones, sometimes turn out to be bad. When they do, consider the words of a certain "Hugh Holub," writing in some whacky website we found on the subject: "It's harder to deal with bad decisions when a great deal of effort has been invested in making them. Whereas, if you made the bad decision by some arbitrary and capricious method (such as flipping a coin or Rock, Paper, Scissors) it is much easier to dump the decision and move on. This is why people who get married on a whim in Las Vegas only take days to get divorces, whereas people who went steady for years and then got married spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on divorce lawyers."