The Meeting That Never Makes a Decision

12 March 2026 · René de Baaij

I know a management team that had the same issue on the agenda six times. Each time, more information was requested. Each time, the decision was postponed.

Not because the information was missing, but because nobody wanted to own a decision that might turn out wrong.

The meeting had become the alibi for not deciding. That pattern is wider than this one team, and it is described by Professor Kuno Huisman, professor of decision-making under uncertainty at Tilburg University and former head of Decision Support at ASML, as a fundamental misunderstanding. We judge the quality of a decision by its outcome, while a good decision can lead to a bad outcome, and a bad decision can turn out well by chance. Quality lies in the process, not in the result. Whoever understands that can also act without certainty, because certainty should never have been the criterion.

Decision quality consists of three elements that are independent of how the world eventually unfolds.

First: clarity about assumptions.

Every decision rests on assumptions about reality. Make those explicit, not as an academic exercise, but as practical protection. If the assumption later turns out to be wrong, you know exactly why the decision turned out differently than expected, and you can distinguish that from a decision that was flawed from the start.

Second: honestly made trade-offs.

Every decision means you are not doing something else. Which option are you dropping, and who bears the consequences? As long as trade-offs remain implicit, responsibilities also remain unclear, and someone only discovers afterwards that they paid the price for a choice that was never named out loud.

Third: learning feedback.

Build in a moment to look back: did the assumptions hold? What do we learn from this for the next decision? Without that moment, every new decision is made from scratch again, even though the organisation has, in effect, already learned the answer once.

In the visible layer, the part of the organisation you can directly arrange, a simple distinction helps: is this decision reversible or not? Reversible decisions may be made quickly, with a low threshold and a high tolerance for experimentation. Irreversible decisions deserve more attention, but not endlessly more. Also set stop criteria: under what circumstance do we withdraw this? A decision without stop criteria is a decision that is never revisited, even when it goes wrong.

One concrete technique that helps here is the pre-mortem.

Imagine that this decision has failed six months from now. What went wrong? By asking that question before you decide, you force the team to name blind spots that would otherwise remain invisible. Teams that run a pre-mortem identify more relevant risks than teams that do not, and they do so without anyone needing to defend themselves, because the question is not about who is at fault, but about what could go wrong.

In the undercurrent, the part you must dare to see before you can address it, lies a division that is rarely named out loud: who carries the fear of losing face if this goes wrong? In hierarchical organisations, the answer is often implicit: the person with the highest position in the room. That makes decision-making above a certain level particularly heavy, and it makes it understandable why leaders ask for more information, organise more consultation, build in more process, not because they genuinely need the information, but because the delay itself offers a form of protection.

But delay is not a risk-free option.

Every day a decision fails to come is also a choice, for the status quo, for the cost of uncertainty among employees who do not know where they stand, for the opportunities a competitor seizes in the meantime while your organisation is still deliberating. The question is not: how do I avoid the risk of deciding? The question is: who bears the risk of not deciding, and do we actually see that clearly enough?

Three actions help make this concrete. Introduce a 48-hour framework for decisions of average complexity: after 48 hours of deliberation, a decision is made, with the information available then, not with the information that might exist if you wait a little longer. Run a twenty-minute pre-mortem for every strategic decision, short enough not to be a barrier, long enough to have an effect. And ask in every management meeting: what needs to be true for us to consider this decision good in six months? That question makes assumptions visible without anyone needing to defend themselves, because it asks about the conditions for success, not about who is responsible if it goes wrong.

Which decision are you postponing because you are actually seeking permission to be allowed to fail? That is not a question meant to condemn yourself. It is a question that, once honestly answered, often resolves half the delay on its own.

Notes for further reading:

Kuno Huisman, Decision Quality Concept (Stanford University, applied in research and teaching at Tilburg University). On the elements that determine the quality of a decision, independent of the eventual outcome.
Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1998, MIT Press). The original source for the pre-mortem technique as an instrument for identifying blind spots before a decision is made.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). On the psychological mechanisms that distort decision-making under uncertainty, including the tendency to confuse outcome with quality of process.
Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2018, Wiley). On how fear of losing face slows decision-making, and how psychological safety can reduce that slowdown.
Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013, Crown Business). On practical techniques for improving decision-making without waiting for full certainty.

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