That’s some statement and it’s not hyperbole. When you go back to the origin of the word, decision comes from the Latin decidere, literally meaning to ‘cut off.’ When you decide, you don’t just choose one path. You eliminate every other possibility that existed a moment before. Interestingly, for the first several centuries of its life, it meant settling a dispute between others. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that decision came to mean what we take for granted today: making up your own mind.
I find that shift fascinating. We’ve moved from decisions as something that resolved conflict between people, to decisions as a private, internal act. And yet the consequences of that private act have never been less private or as impactful on others.
Today, you’re not just cutting off possibilities for yourself. You’re cutting off possibilities for people, organisations, even nations you’ll never meet. A decision made in a boardroom can ripple through a supply chain on the other side of the world before you’ve finished your coffee.
The food on our tables, the water from our taps, the energy that heats our homes — all of it depends on a fantastically complex web of interconnected systems, many of which are already straining under pressure. Tweak one element, and the whole structure can shudder.
This is the weight every senior leader carries now, whether they name it or not. And it’s precisely why so many decisions get made badly. Under time pressure, under the demand for a quick fix, we cut off possibilities before we’ve properly seen them. We reach for the obvious answer because there’s no time or space for the less obvious one. And the tragedy is, even when a leader does have that time and space, the outcome still isn’t guaranteed. No one — not you, not me, not the sharpest strategist in the room — can fully grasp how today’s system-wide interconnections will carry a decision made here into consequences somewhere else entirely.
All any of us can do is our genuine best.
This is where I see so many of the executives I work with quietly struggling. Not because they lack intelligence or courage, but because they’ve never been willing to sit with the discomfort of an irreversible choice made inside a system they can never fully understand. They mistake speed for decisiveness, and certainty for wisdom, when neither is usually the case.
If you’re facing a significant decision right now, resist the urge to rush to closure. Before you cut off those other possibilities, ask yourself what you might be excluding without realising it. And whether that exclusion is coming from genuine clarity, or simply from the pressure to be seen to act. Widen your view for a little longer than feels comfortable. Consider who and what sits beyond your immediate frame, however distant. Then decide. Not because you have certainty, but because you’ve done the work certainty can never fully give you.
Leadership was never about eliminating uncertainty. It’s about making your best decision inside it, eyes open to what you’re choosing to cut away.
What decision are you sitting with today? And what are you cutting off to make it?
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