The Decisions You Don't Make Don't Disappear

Back in 2003, researchers Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein published a study in Science that revealed something remarkable about how people make decisions.

Germany and Austria share a border, a language, and plenty of cultural history. But when the researchers compared organ-donation consent, they found a difference that was almost hard to believe.

In Germany, the effective consent rate was around 12%. In Austria, it was nearly 100%, a gap of almost 90 percentage points between neighboring countries.

You'd expect some enormous cultural divide to explain that: different attitudes toward death, maybe, or different levels of trust in government. Something big.

One of the most powerful explanations turned out to be much simpler.

The default.

In Germany, becoming an organ donor required people to opt in. In Austria, consent was presumed unless someone chose to opt out.

The researchers tested the effect experimentally too, presenting people with essentially the same decision but changing how the options were arranged.

Now, the research didn't establish that defaults alone explained the gap between countries, or that consent translated directly into actual donations. It did, however, demonstrate something I've long found interesting.

The way we structure a decision can influence what people do, even when the choices themselves haven't changed.

Nobody in Germany was denied a choice. They simply had to take an extra step to act on it, and many didn't. The choice wasn't necessarily a gift.

It was also a job.

I ran into the same thing recently staring at a restaurant menu with what felt like 127 items. More variety and flexibility, but now I had to sort through it all.

Somewhere between the sixth sandwich and the fourth kind of chicken, I realized the restaurant had quietly handed me a job.

I've watched organizations do the same, usually with the best intentions.

A leadership team hasn't agreed on which priorities matter most, so it tells employees to use their judgment. Two departments carry overlapping responsibilities, so their managers are encouraged to collaborate. Nobody has settled what success should look like, so the team is asked to think strategically.

Sound familiar?

None of those instructions is necessarily bad.

Under the right circumstances, they're exactly what capable people need. But I've started paying closer attention to what happens after they're given. Who ends up deciding which priority takes precedence, resolving disagreements between departments, and determining whether the team's work actually constitutes success?

Sometimes those decisions belong with the people closest to the work.

Other times, what should have been settled upstream has quietly become somebody else's problem to solve.

We tend to call this empowerment, and sometimes it is. Often, though, we're transferring the work of deciding to people with less information, less authority, and already full plates.

If you've ever been accountable for a result without the authority to settle the questions holding it up, you know the feeling of spending an unreasonable amount of time chasing decisions that belong to someone else.

Then when you can't make the call yourself, your influence comes down to whether you can get the right person to see what's unresolved and why it matters.

That's a distinction I've come to appreciate more as I've worked with leaders and technical experts.

Decisions we leave open don't disappear. Someone else makes them, often without realizing they're making them. Or nobody makes them, and the default takes over.

The existing process just continues, the loudest voice sets the priority, and the team keeps doing what it did last quarter because nobody has made a convincing case for changing direction.

Doing nothing becomes the decision, even when nobody intended it to be.

And the cost doesn't always surface where we'd expect. A team that keeps circling the same issue can look, from the outside, like a productivity problem, when it's really an accumulation of decisions nobody has resolved.

In a 1990 paper, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon compared human decision-making to a pair of scissors.

One blade is the limits of the mind: attention, memory, and reasoning are all finite. The other blade is the environment we're deciding in. Neither blade works alone.

Notice where we aim our effort when people struggle to decide well.

We coach them to think more strategically, develop their judgment, and push them to take more ownership. All of it sharpens the first blade. But the scissors raise a question we rarely ask.

What if the person isn't the part that needs fixing?

What good is training someone to prioritize if leadership won't set priorities? How much ownership can we expect when nobody knows what they're actually allowed to decide?

That's the second blade, and it's where clarity gets more interesting than we usually allow.

We treat clarity as a communication skill, the business of saying things plainly and explaining expectations, but it also shapes the environment people work in: what they have to figure out alone, what they can act on confidently, and where their judgment is genuinely needed.

Sometimes the most influential thing a leader can do is settle something that's been left open.

That means being thoughtful about which decisions belong where, and whether people have the context and authority to make them well.

Here are three practices that help me examine my own habits.

Let’s get it…

You can't remove work you can't see, and the person setting the work down is usually the last to feel its weight. So I've started using a question I call the

It's uncomfortable when you take it seriously. Sometimes the answer is no: the person closer to the work has better information, or owns the outcome.

That's delegation, and it's often exactly right. But sometimes the answer is yes. I have the information, authority, and I just haven't used it.

In that moment I'm not empowering anyone. I'm forwarding my mail: dropping a decision that was mine to make, unopened, into someone else's inbox with "thoughts?" scrawled across the front.

What makes it hard to catch is how much forwarding sounds like trust.

I've used all of them. The question is whether the person receiving them has what they need to act.

Then there's the boomerang: the same question coming back every week in slightly different clothing.

Other times it's one unresolved decision circling the organization, looking for someone who can settle it, and every trip creates more work.

You never get rid of the decision. You just make everyone handle it more than once.

This is where I've had to be honest with myself.

A decision might drift downstream for no reason related to who's best positioned to make it. Making the call would cost me something: a disagreement, a disappointed colleague, the risk of being wrong on the record.

"Use your judgment" can be genuine trust or conflict-avoidance wearing generosity's clothes, and from the receiving end the two can look remarkably similar.

Two things stand out to me in leaders who are good at resolving these. The first is a willingness to name the tradeoff.

Anyone can list what matters. A priority is the moment something you value loses to something you value more.

Consider the difference between telling a team that speed and quality both matter, and saying, "When speed and polish compete on this project, speed wins, as long as we meet our agreed quality standards."

The second version gives people something they can actually use when the two collide.

Instead of eliminating judgment, it gives judgment a boundary. If nothing ever has to lose, you haven't really set priorities, you've published hopes, and people discover the difference the moment things get difficult.

The second thing I've noticed is a willingness to name who owns the decision, which can feel surprisingly uncomfortable in organizations that prize collaboration.

Shared ownership sounds generous, inclusive, safe, right up until a decision has to be made and nobody knows who has the final call.

Then collaboration turns into an extended negotiation settled by whoever has the most persistence, political capital, or patience.

I've come to see that naming one accountable decision-maker doesn't diminish collaboration. It tends to make collaboration easier, because everyone knows where the decision belongs. And that owner doesn't always have to be you.

Not every unresolved decision needs you to make it, but it needs someone to stop pretending it's already been made.

Here's something I've noticed about decisions made in good meetings. Everyone leaves aligned: the issue was discussed, the tradeoffs weighed, somebody made the call. Then, three weeks later, the same question surfaces.

Nobody remembers quite what was agreed, someone recalls it differently, the person who decided isn't in the room, and everybody's back where they started.

The decision happened, but it never became part of how the work gets done.

This is the second blade of Simon's scissors in action. A decision that lives only in your head, or in the collective memory of one good meeting, leaves other people with the work of remembering and interpreting it.

The fix comes in two parts.

Put the answer where the hand hovers: the workflow, the brief, the template someone actually opens.

The leaders I trust most aren't always the ones making the most decisions. They're the ones who seem to understand which decisions are theirs to make, which are better left to others, and what happens when nobody makes the call.

Them settling something makes it easier for everyone else to move forward without having to revisit it.

That's what I've come to appreciate about clarity.

It helps people understand what we mean and spend less time figuring out what we should have settled already.

I actually wonder how much of the exhaustion we see in organizations comes from the work itself as opposed to the constant effort of navigating decisions that were never settled.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!