The assumptions, information, people and pressures influencing decisions in businesses, teams and organisations

• A business owner decides they need more marketing.
• A manager decides they need another employee.
• A team decides its process needs to change.
• An organisation decides it needs a new system.
• A leader says yes.
• Another says no.

We tend to focus on the decision itself. Was it right? Was it wrong? Did it work? But by the time somebody finally says yes or no, a great deal may already have shaped that decision.

• How was the problem described?
• What information was presented?
• What wasn’t?
• What assumptions had already been accepted?
• Who was consulted?
• Whose perspective carried the most weight?
• What risks mattered?
• What outcome was being prioritised?
• And who ultimately had the authority to decide?

Perhaps the more useful question is not simply: Was it the right decision? But: What shaped the decision in the first place?

Decisions start before the decision

The way we define a problem influences where we look for the answer.

• Sales are down, so marketing must be the problem.
• Work isn’t getting completed, so we need more people.
• Customers are complaining, so customer service needs fixing.
• A project isn’t progressing, so project management must be the issue.
• Employees aren’t adopting a change, so they must be resistant.

Sometimes that diagnosis will be right. Sometimes it won’t.

McKinsey examined this in its 2025 work on the framing effect, a well-established cognitive bias where the way a problem or information is presented can influence the options people consider and the decisions they make. Its central point for organisations is important: misframing the question can lead to solving the wrong problem. McKinsey & Company  Once something has been defined as the problem, attention naturally starts moving towards solving it.

The conversation becomes: How do we improve our marketing? rather than: Why have sales actually fallen? Or: Who should we recruit? rather than: What is causing the capacity problem in the first place? The distinction matters. Because, before solving a problem, we need to be reasonably confident that we understand what the problem actually is.

When assumptions quietly become facts

Every decision involves assumptions. We need them. We simply cannot know everything before making a decision. The problem arises when we stop recognising them as assumptions. Consider how easily statements like these enter business conversations:

• Customers won’t pay that.
• The team won’t support it.
• We’ve already tried that.
• Management won’t approve it.
• We need another person.
• Customers want this.
• This is how our industry works.

Those statements may be correct. But what are they based on? Evidence? Past experience? One conversation? An expectation? An interpretation? Something that was true three years ago? Something that has been repeated so often that nobody questions it anymore?

McKinsey’s 2025 examination of decision-making biases describes confirmation bias as our tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that support an existing view. One way to counter it is to deliberately look for evidence that could disprove the original hypothesis, rather than only evidence that confirms it. McKinsey & Company

Instead of asking, ‘What supports our view?’ perhaps consider asking, ‘What would tell us we are wrong?’ Because there is an important difference between ‘we think’ and ‘we know.

Who gets heard?

Decisions in organisations are rarely shaped by one person alone.

There may be people who experience the problem, provide information, analyse it, recommend an option, influence the recommendation, approve funding, implement the outcome or stop something from proceeding. And there may be somebody who ultimately holds the authority to say yes or no.

Those roles are not the same. Being consulted does not necessarily mean having decision authority. Likewise, holding decision authority does not mean having all the information, operational knowledge or lived experience held elsewhere in the organisation.

Decision quality can therefore depend partly on what happens before information reaches the final decision-maker.

• What has been filtered?
• What has been simplified?
• What context has been added or removed?
• Which voices were included?
• Were opposing views tested or dismissed?
• Was the decision-maker presented with genuine options, or effectively a recommendation seeking approval?

Understanding who informs, influences, recommends, decides and ultimately owns the outcome can be just as important as the decision itself.

Two people can see the same information differently

We often assume that if two people have the same facts, they should reach the same conclusion. Not necessarily. Two people can look at exactly the same situation and reach different decisions because they are weighting different things.

• One may prioritise growth.
• Another may prioritise risk.
• One may be focused on customer experience.
• Another on cost.
• Someone else may be considering staff capacity, regulation, reputation, time, operational feasibility or whether the organisation can realistically deliver what is being proposed.

That does not automatically make one person right and the other wrong. But what it does do is it raises another question: What is each person trying to protect, achieve or optimise?

Sometimes what looks like disagreement about the answer is actually disagreement about what matters most. Making those priorities visible can change the conversation.

More information doesn’t automatically mean better decisions

Businesses and organisations now have access to more information than ever. Dashboards, customer data, financial information, performance measures, research, analytics and increasingly, AI. But access to more information does not remove the need for judgement.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 60% of executives surveyed regularly use AI to support decisions, yet only 5% considered their organisation to be leading in addressing AI and decision-making. Deloitte’s separate decision-intelligence research also found that 57% of organisations studied operated at low decision-making maturity, with relatively few systematically teaching decision skills or providing tools to support them. Deloitte

Technology may improve the speed and volume of analysis. The underlying questions remain.

• What information can we trust?
• What does it actually tell us?
• What might be missing?
• What trade-offs are involved?
• What level of risk are we prepared to accept?
• Who remains accountable?
• And what outcome are we actually trying to achieve?

Technology can support a decision. But, it does not remove the need to think.

Has a decision actually been made?

Organisations can create considerable confusion when different stages of decision-making are treated as though they mean the same thing. There is a difference between:

• We are exploring this.
• We are considering this.
• We recommend this.
• We have decided this.
• We have authorised implementation.
• We have reconsidered the decision.

If those stages are unclear then:

• People may begin acting on something that was still being explored.
• Managers may communicate something that has not yet been fully authorised.
• Employees may begin preparing for a change that is subsequently reconsidered.

Reconsidering a decision is not necessarily a problem. New information, risk or changing circumstances should sometimes result in a different decision. The issue is clarity.

• What was decided?
• By whom?
• On what basis?
• What remains open for discussion?
• What authority has been given to proceed?
• And if the decision changes, what new information or consideration caused it to change?

A simple question can help: “Just so we’re clear, are we exploring this, recommending it, or has a decision actually been made?”

When “resistance to change” may not be the real problem

When employees question or push back on a change, it can be tempting to conclude that they simply do not like change. But that conclusion deserves testing too.

Consider an organisation where significant changes are being discussed or directed, managers begin preparing teams, concerns are raised about workload, risk or employee impact, and the original direction is later reconsidered.

From an employee’s perspective, the issue may not necessarily be the change itself.

It may be uncertainty about what has actually been decided, who made the decision, why it is happening, what other changes are occurring at the same time, what it means for their work, and whether today’s direction will still stand tomorrow.

That distinction matters. What is described as resistance to change may sometimes be a response to unclear decision-making, competing changes, inconsistent direction or cumulative pressure.

Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends research reported that one-third of workers surveyed had experienced more than 15 major changes in the previous year. Among respondents, 68% reported decreased wellbeing associated with the pace of change and 60% reported increased workload. Only 27% of leaders surveyed said their organisations managed change effectively. Deloitte

So before concluding that people are resistant, consider: what exactly are people responding to? If the diagnosis is “our people don’t like change”, then the response may be more communication, engagement or training. But if the underlying issue is unclear decision rights, competing priorities, unmanaged change load or inconsistent direction, then those actions may not address the actual problem.

Again, how we frame the problem shapes the solution that follows.

Will doing it later actually solve the problem?

When an organisation is experiencing significant levels of change, another understandable response is, ‘Can we push this change to next year?’

Sometimes the answer may legitimately be yes because sequencing matters, capacity matters, and timing matters. But postponing a change is not, by itself, a solution.

I wonder, ‘What will be materially different next year?’ Will there be fewer competing initiatives? Greater capacity? More resources? Better information? Resolved dependencies? Clearer decision-making? Greater readiness? Or will the same change simply arrive alongside a new set of changes and pressures?

Prosci’s current work on change saturation makes a useful distinction between the volume of disruptive change and people’s capacity to absorb it. Slowing a roadmap, spacing initiatives or delaying lower-priority changes may help reduce collisions, but reducing the amount of change does not necessarily resolve the underlying capacity issue. Prosci: That means postponement is itself a decision that should be tested.

The question is not simply, ‘Can we move it?’ but rather, what problem are we actually trying to solve by moving it, and what will be different when we get there? Otherwise, we may simply be moving the pressure rather than solving the problem.

How a decision is made matters too

People do not experience organisational decisions only through the eventual outcome. They also experience how the decision was reached.

• Were the right people heard?
• Was the reasoning clear?
• Were the risks considered?
• Were competing priorities understood?
• Was the decision consistent with what had previously been communicated?
• Was it clear who was accountable?
• And when circumstances changed, was that explained?

This does not mean every employee needs to agree with every decision or participate in every decision. Nor does it mean organisations should avoid difficult decisions because people may not like them. What it does mean is that there is value in distinguishing between disagreement with a decision and lack of confidence in how the decision was reached. Those are different issues and require two different responses.

And the decision isn’t the end

A decision can look perfectly reasonable on paper and still fail to produce the intended outcome.

• Perhaps nobody clearly owned the next step.
• Perhaps the people implementing it did not understand the reasoning.
• Perhaps a dependency was missed.
• Perhaps the organisation lacked capacity.
• Perhaps circumstances changed.
• Perhaps the underlying problem had been misdiagnosed.
• Or perhaps nobody went back afterwards to determine whether the expected benefit actually occurred.

This is why decision quality and outcome quality are not always the same thing. A well-considered decision can produce an unexpected outcome. A poorly considered decision can occasionally succeed. What matters is whether we learn from the difference.

• What did we expect to happen?
• What actually happened?
• Why? Why not?
• What would we do differently next time?

Without that review, businesses and organisations can make decisions repeatedly without necessarily getting better at making them.

Before the next decision: The Decision Check

Before progressing a significant business or organisational decision, pause and ask:

1. What are we actually deciding?
Are we exploring, recommending, approving, postponing or implementing?

2. What problem are we trying to solve?
Have we tested whether that is actually the problem?

3. What do we know, and what are we assuming?
What evidence supports our view? What evidence would challenge it?

4. Who needs to be heard before the decision is made?
Who experiences the problem, who holds relevant information and who will need to implement the outcome?

5. What are we prioritising?
Cost, risk, growth, customer impact, people, time, compliance, capacity or something else?

6. What else is happening at the same time?
What other decisions, initiatives or changes are competing for the same people, resources and attention?

7. If we delay it, what will actually be different?
Are we resolving the problem, creating the conditions to deal with it better, or simply moving it?

8. Who actually decides?
Who recommends, who approves and who owns the outcome?

9. What happens next?
Who is responsible, by when, and how will people know what has been decided?

10. How will we know whether it worked?
What outcome are we expecting, and when will we come back and test it?

These questions will not remove uncertainty from decision-making. But what they can do is make the thinking behind a decision more visible. And sometimes that is where the real problem becomes clearer. Because by the time somebody says yes or no, the decision may have been taking shape for much longer than we realise.

Need to pull apart a decision before moving forward?

If you’re dealing with a business or organisational decision that feels unclear, stuck or more complicated than it first appeared, I work with business owners, leaders and teams to pull problems apart, challenge assumptions, work out what matters most and turn that into clear, practical action.

Start with a complimentary 20-minute introductory conversation to see whether I can help.

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