The Decision That Defers Itself

The senior person is, by definition, someone who has built a career on making decisions that other people defer to. The board defers to the founder. The team defers to the senior executive. The client defers to the partner. The cumulative effect of this, over decades, is that the senior person is, in any room she enters, the one whose decision the room is waiting for.

What is strange is how often, in private, the same senior person is unable to make a particular decision in her own life that has been waiting, in some form, for years.

The decision is rarely large in any conventional sense. It is the decision to have the conversation with the spouse that has been needed since the second child arrived. The decision to leave the role that has been not quite right since the last promotion. The decision to call the friend who quietly disappeared three years ago. The decision to stop the small daily compromise that, by itself, costs nothing and, in aggregate, costs almost everything. Each of these decisions, if assigned to the senior person professionally, would be made within a day. Each, in the personal frame, has been pending for years.

The reason for the asymmetry is not, primarily, that the personal decisions are harder. Some of them are easier. The reason is that the professional decisions are structured to resolve, and the personal ones are structured to defer.

A professional decision lives inside a system that produces consequences when it is not made. The deal closes or it does not. The hire happens or it does not. The project ships or it does not. The system, in each case, has a built-in mechanism that converts indecision into a different decision, and that mechanism is operational regardless of what the senior person feels about it. The decision is made because not making it is also a decision, and the system is keeping score either way.

The personal decision lives inside a system that produces no consequences from non-action in the short term. The conversation does not happen and the day continues. The role does not change and the work proceeds. The friend stays unmentioned and nothing visible deteriorates. The deferral has, structurally, no cost in the week it occurs. The cost is in the cumulative deferral, which is paid in years, in a currency the senior person is not in the habit of reading.

The work that addresses this is not the work of getting better at personal decisions. The senior person is already excellent at decisions. The work is the work of importing into the personal frame the conditions that make decisions resolve in the professional frame.

What those conditions are, structurally, is three things. There is a deadline. There is a person who is waiting for the decision. There is a consequence that follows from the decision not being made. The professional decision has all three by default. The personal decision has none of them by default. The senior person who tries to make the personal decision using the same internal procedure she uses for the professional one finds that the procedure does not engage, because the inputs the procedure is calibrated to are not present.

The work, then, is the installation of those inputs. The deadline that the personal decision is committed to. The person who is told that the decision is being made by a particular date. The consequence that has been articulated, in advance, for the decision not being made. None of this is original. It is the same set of conditions the senior person uses every day in professional work. What is striking is how rarely she uses it on her own behalf.

Why she does not use it on her own behalf is the more uncomfortable question. The answer, most often, is that the personal decision threatens something the professional one does not. The professional decision threatens outcomes. The personal decision threatens identity. The conversation with the spouse, if it happens, may produce information about who she has become that she has been organising her life to not have to look at. The departure from the role may produce, in the months that follow, the absence of the identity the role has been holding. The call to the friend may produce information about the kind of friend she has been, which is harder to receive than information about the kind of executive she has been.

This is the work the Diagnostic is, in part, designed to surface. Not the answer to the personal decision. The reading of what the decision has been protecting, and what the protection has cost. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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