The Fear of Making the Wrong Choice

The fear of making the wrong choice is one of the most powerful forces in an organization. It’s sneaky, hiding in plain sight, quietly influencing decisions without people realizing it.

We're so scared of making the wrong decision, that we don't choose.

And we feel great for not choosing, because we’re choosing to do it all. YEEHAWW! We rally the troops and tell them: “Let’s go team! We’ve got this!”. We foolishly choose to keep all our options open and waste our effort to inspire everyone to put their shoulders under it.

But here’s the catch: those options aren’t harmless. They’re silently and invisibly cannibalizing each other.

The cannibalization is immediately noticeable for the people that do the work. They’re pulled in a thousand directions and spread too thin. The leadership team doesn’t experience the self-inflicted cannibalization and simply thinks: why are they not working harder to make it work?

Our leaders believe we're trying to do all of it, while in fact we will only be doing some of it. The problem is that we’ve lost control over what some of it we will be completing.

When those competing interests begin cannibalizing each other, you lose control. We should not fear making the wrong choice, we should fear not making enough choices.

Do we want to be constrained by doing too many different and competing things at the same time? Or do we want to constrain ourselves by making tough decisions and applying rigorous focus?

What makes it incredibly hard is that tough decisions often make us instantly feel bad. Choosing to not do something, means we immediately lose something. We feel that sting immediately. Keeping all our options option makes us feel great. We stay in our happy illusion that nothing is lost, until reality kicks in.

When ultimately the rubble of failed choices comes crashing down on us, we usually find something else to blame, instead of our original failure to make more choices.

The fear or making the wrong choice is extremely human, but instead of running away and letting it catch up to us, we should lean in. Because not making enough tough decisions is THE wrong choice.

The only question we should ask ourselves: do we want to control the pain of losing something or do we want to leave it up to chance?