Why Decision Coaching Actually Works
Getting unstuck requires more than a mindset shift
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Big decisions are hard, paralyzing even.
But I have good news: It’s not you, and it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Today, I want to talk about how decision coaching actually works. How it brings clarity to some of life’s toughest decisions, all in a reproducible, replicable, and easy-to-follow way.
But first, some science: In the 1980s, the decision scientist Paul Nutt began tracking hundreds of strategic decisions inside corporations, hospitals, and government agencies, following each one from its first iteration to its final result. Half of them failed. [1]
Surprised? Yeah, so was he. So surprised that he titled the paper in which he published his result “Surprising but true: Half the decisions in organizations fail.”
He also found that, In the bulk of the failures, decision-makers basically anchored on a single option. They adopted it early and defended it to the end.
Keith Stanovich's research on rationality points to at least one of the reasons—performance on decision tasks shows a weak correlation with IQ, a gap wide enough that he coined a term for it, dysrationalia. [2]
Making high-quality decisions, it turns out, is its own skill, separable from intelligence and domain expertise. This is why you can manage an entire P&L, operate on patients, broker million-dollar deals—and still find yourself paralyzed by a decision that affects you and the people you love.
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What distinguishes decision coaching from standard life and executive coaching
Standard executive coaching operates on the person: mindset, presence, communication, confidence, and even past trauma. And look, that work has significant value. I have my own executive coach, whom I adore and with whom I’ve been working for a long time.
At the same time, standard executive coaching is more likely to treat decision paralysis as a psychological state to be soothed and understood, rather than as a tractable, solvable problem.
Which is where decision coaching comes in. When a choice is plagued with what-ifs and overanalysis, the cause is, more often than not, structural: objectives are left implicit, or an option set is poorly queried, or a selection criterion shifts mid-deliberation, or stakeholders surface late, or an execution path that’s, at best, a sketch.
Before we go on… Are you stuck on some big decisions? Let’s talk ↓
The six steps to a good decision
Decision coaching surgically installs a procedure into your big question that addresses each failure point in sequence.
It starts with the Why: what are you trying to solve, what objectives are you trying to achieve, and (crucially), how do these objectives trade off against each other? No career or life decision will achieve every single thing at the same level, so weighting your desired outcomes becomes incredibly important.
Second, the What. What is your full option set? In other words, what are the choices you know you have—and what are the ones you haven’t thought of yet? Remember Nutt’s finding that bad decisions come from anchoring on a single option? This counteracts that.
What decision-making feels like sometimes. Photo by Unsplash
Third, the Framework: Do you choose based on upside benefit? Downside risk? Regret? Something else? We build that into your decision, so that the choice you finally make is true to you.
Fourth, the Who: We map the stakeholders whose incentives will shape both the choice and its aftermath. Who’s a co-decider? Who’s just someone to be consulted? And how do we incorporate them?
Fifth, the How: Even after you’ve decided what you want to do, there are a lot of things that can keep you from acting: the finances, rebranding, operational friction. A decision is only as good as the action that comes after it, so we delineate that action and build a plan to effectuate it.
Finally, the When. There will never be a perfect time to pull the trigger. But there’s a way to figure out the best time to do it anyway. After all, the timing is itself a decision!
Decision coaching works because it’s science
Every bit of the above decision coaching framework is built on science, even down to the structure itself.
Ralph Keeney, one of the early giants in the decision science world, wrote an entire book that he called Value-Focused Thinking [3] for a reason: objectives have to be articulated before alternatives are examined. Reverse the order and you put yourself at risk for failure. Putting the What in front of the Why leads to “motivated reasoning”—reverse-engineering criteria just to justify the option you’ve already chosen. (In my TEDx talk, I called this “shoehorning purpose to fit the path you’re already on”).
Putting Purpose Over Path, TEDxBostonCollege
Putting the Why in front of the What, on the other hand, protects against something that poker players call “resulting”—judging the quality of a decision based on what actually happened afterwards.
It’s counter-intuitive, but sometimes good decisions produce bad outcomes and bad decisions get lucky. This is why Ronald Howard, who invented the idea of decision quality, suggests that a structured method lets you evaluate—and defend to a board, a spouse, or your future self—your choices.
Why decision frameworks produce better choices
Which brings me to the Framework. Choosing one that’s true to you is deeply important. Maximizing upside, protecting downside, rationalizing probabilities, and minimizing regret are four different possible approaches to uncertainty—and they do not always lead to the same decision. For the exact same option set, they might suggest four different answers! And unfortunately, many “gut” decisions are deeply influenceable by whichever mood the morning supplies. This is why the same option might look brilliant on Tuesday and utterly reckless on Thursday. This is why my clients and I choose the framework—out loud, in advance, and before we see which option it spits out.
The How stage draws on Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation with intention: He found that commitments tied to concrete conditions get executed several times more often than just abstract logic. [4] And finally the When applies option-value logic. Not deciding has a price. Getting more information—that has a price too. So too does acting and getting the decision wrong. And the good thing about prices is that you can actually compare them, instead of just judging them based on 2am anxiety.
Finally, the structure itself is the point. Because the system is replicable, each decision trains the next. The surgeon Atul Gawande and his team showed that checklists improve outcomes for surgeons (a fact that aviation has known for years). [5] The same holds just as true for your big decisions.
Your Big Decisions Deserve More Than Guesswork
You’re not stuck in your big decisions because there’s something wrong with you. Instead, it’s because high-stakes decisions live outside every discipline at once. And because of that, they generate interminable what-ifs. A replicable, repeatable, and personalized system converts an open-ended anxiety into a bounded analysis with a defined endpoint.
That conversion, more than any single technique, is why decision coaching actually works.
If a consequential decision is sitting on your desk right now, let’s build you a process to make it. Schedule a Consultation.
Paralyzed by choice? Over-analyzing?
You don’t have to navigate it alone. Work with a decision coach who knows how to guide you to a life you’re madly in love with again.
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