Wisdom
Being a Good Decision Maker Isn't the Same as Being Decisive
The wisdom to know the costs and benefits of being indecisive and decisive.
Posted March 17, 2020
Being indecisive has its costs. If you hem and haw or waffle, you can miss opportunities or fail for having tried everything but consistency. There will be times to make up your mind, black and white, and just stick with it.
In fiction, we see our heroes do just that. They commit, stay steadfast against all the odds, and ultimately prevail—but mostly against villains who commit, stay steadfast against all the odds, and ultimately fail.
Such heroes and villains are both decisive. It's a war between good and evil, not between decisive and indecisive. We assume that heroes are dedicated and that villains are pigheaded. But really, what's the difference?
The difference between being dedicated and pigheaded is the difference between predicting a good or bad outcome. We call a hero's decisiveness "dedicated," because we're rooting for their good outcome. We call a villain's decisiveness "pigheaded," because we're rooting against their bad outcome.
Being decisive has its costs too. One can be too decisive too quickly and proud of it too. It can feel manly and brave to put your foot down and leave it there. It's not always brave. Indeed, sometimes such fast decision-making is often driven by fear of uncertainty, a sense of powerlessness when facing options and possibilities. It's easy to dress up fear of uncertainty as a macho decisiveness.
Decisiveness can be laziness too. It takes effort to make good decisions, so why bother? Sure, you want to have made good decisions, but it's costly to make them, so just act like you have. It's easier to feel decisive with cocky self-certainty than with a careful exploration of your options, so just gut-slouch into a decision and pretend that you're being heroically decisive.
One way or another, there are eager believers, overeager beavers about knowing once and for all what they believe, hot to jump to conclusions and speed through forks in the road. They need to have decided yesterday already.
It's hard to explore with eager believers. They have to know what to believe right away, and they're very black and white about it, no room for the gray of uncertainty. If they're leaning toward Option A, and you raise any questions about it, they assume that you're black-and-white advocating for Option B.
Everybody prefers chocolate ice cream!
Really? Everybody?!
Oh, so you're certain that everybody prefers vanilla ice cream? What an idiot!
They assume that everyone is or should be as black-and-white as they are. That way, they can immediately sort out their allies from their enemies. They'll project their eager believing onto their opponents. Anyone who challenges their certainty is simpleminded.
Having committed impulsively, they're stuck rationalizing their rash decisiveness, grabbing any possible excuse why it wasn't rash. They lept in a hole and just have to keep digging rather than admitting that they lept.
The Tao Te Ching has a lovely line about the value of indecisiveness:
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
Still, the Tao overall is appropriately indecisive on the value of decisiveness. The ambiguity is buried in the quote. The right action arising by itself? That, too, is a kind of decisiveness. And how do we know when the right action has arisen? Aren't eager believers confident that the right action has arisen by itself?
The Tao is symbolized by the yin yang symbol, two qualities embedded within and in balance with each other. Yin, the female element, is often interpreted as receptivity, in other words, not deciding yet, not knowing yet, wondering, considering, exploring. Yang, the male or macho element, is often interpreted as the sword of decisiveness. That dot in the middle of each represents the fractal nature of both qualities, a bit of yin in the yang and yang in the yin.
If you can stand the vulgarity, the partners who write "South Park" offer a wise commentary on yin and yang at the end of their movie "Team America." It recognizes that one can be too decisively indecisive as easily as one can become too decisively decisive. Our greatest enemy, it suggests, is neither yin nor yang, but either without the shadow of the dot in each. Pure indecisiveness is as dangerous as pure decisiveness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald also has a lovely line celebrating the wisdom of recognizing the tension between yin and yang:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Holding two opposing ideas in mind implies yin receptivity. Retaining the ability to function implies the yang of decisiveness.
To Fitzgerald, a first-rate intelligence is one that not only manages the opposites tugging at our indecisiveness but also the tension between indecisiveness and decisiveness.
We need both. Wisdom is recognizing that decisiveness and indecisiveness each have their place and then trying to figure out their respective places. A first-rate intelligence can remember the opposites even when committing to one. Committing to Plan A, the first-rate intelligence doesn't forget the costs of Plan A or the benefits of Plan B. Even when being decisive, a first-rate intelligence harbors a dinghy of doubt that will enable them to change their mind if necessary.
It's easy to oversimplify, claiming, for example, that one should always be open-minded and indecisive. Or conversely, that one should always be steadfast and committed. Neither always works.
We are all under pressure to be consistent in our actions. Since most things worth doing take persistence, we don't want to wake up every day open to doing whatever. Perseverance furthers, though what it furthers is the real question. Perseverance in the wrong direction furthers in the wrong direction.
There are social advantages to being decisive too. It's hard enough navigating life's uncertainties without people waffling indecisively. People want you to be constant. That way they'll know how to deal with you.
It's easy to see why people would prefer decisiveness. If everyone just stays put, navigating to one's goal is as easy as following GPS. People being indecisive or changing their minds is like following GPS with the roads and forks changing all the time. Being an eager-believer is a kind of robo-envy: wishing that navigating to our goals was as reliable as programming a computer. Just program in your destination and arrive.
Ideally, people would be reliably decisive when they're decisively aligned with us, and indecisive when we're still waiting for the mud to settle and the water to clear, or when they're decisively opposed to our decisiveness. That's what we'd like. It's not what we've got and for good reason. We're human. We're not robots. Humans are less reliable than robots.
Other people changing their minds impose a burden on eager believers. Other people's uncertainty means that they may have to rethink things, which they're loath to do. Why won't everyone just stay put? Why can't I count on my enemies to stay my enemies and my allies to stay my allies?
Eager believers take such expectation of reliability to dangerous levels. They're certain that their decisiveness is heroic even when it's villainous.
How then do you coax exploration out of eager believers? I've found it useful to respond to them starting with "Indeed. There's that and…" Affirm the factors that they claim have made them decisive, but don't stop there. Because there are always other factors to explore.
Indeed, many people do prefer chocolate ice cream and…