In mid-1985, Andy Grove and Intel chairman Gordon Moore were sitting in Grove's office staring at a problem they'd been circling for almost a year.
Intel had built its identity — and most of its revenue — on memory chips. Japanese manufacturers were undercutting them at every turn, improving quality while driving prices down relentlessly. Intel had tried everything: retreating into niches, building premium products, cutting costs.
Nothing worked. Profits had collapsed from $198 million to almost nothing. They had meetings, more meetings, conflicting proposals.
Then Grove asked Moore a question that cut through everything. “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?”
Moore answered without hesitation. “He would get us out of memories.”
Grove stared at him. Then said: “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?”
They didn’t know microprocessors would save Intel. The PC wave wasn’t yet visible. They couldn’t be certain of the outcome.
What they could see clearly was the cost of waiting — another year of half-measures, declining market share, and mounting losses while they gathered information that would never fully resolve the uncertainty.
They acted on what they knew, not on what they wished they could know. The exit cost 8,000 jobs and a $180 million loss in 1986. Intel went on to a 4,500% increase in market capitalisation over the following decade.
That outcome wasn’t knowable when the decision was made. The decision was made anyway.
If you want the wider picture on the process behind every call you make, the Leader’s Guide to Decision Making is where to start.
Why the Wait Feels Responsible
The brain reads “get more data” as diligence.
It signals conscientiousness and caution. The person who asks for one more week looks like they’re taking the decision seriously. The person who acts on incomplete information looks reckless.
This is the illusion of control at work. We believe that more information will narrow the uncertainty — that if we wait long enough, the picture will become clear. Sometimes it does. But often the additional information you’re waiting for either confirms what you already know, arrives too late to matter, or never arrives at all.
The real question isn’t “do I have enough information?” It’s “would more information change my decision?”
If the honest answer is no, every day of waiting is a day of stalling dressed up as diligence. That’s the process failure — not acting too fast, but waiting without a reason to wait.
Understanding how to improve your decision making starts here — with recognising when gathering more information has become an end in itself rather than a means to a better call.
The Decision You Don’t Realise You’re Making
Waiting is a decision.
Not a neutral pause, not a responsible hold. A decision — with consequences that accumulate from the moment you make it.
Every day a leader delays a significant call, something happens in its place. A competitor moves. A team member loses confidence. A client reads the silence as uncertainty. An opportunity closes.
The cost of inaction isn’t zero. It’s invisible — which is why it’s so easy to ignore.
Most leaders think of inaction as the safe option. It isn’t. It’s simply the option whose costs are harder to see in the moment.
Consider a product team holding back a launch because they want one more round of user testing. Each week of delay costs developer time, delays revenue, and gives competitors room to move. At some point the cost of waiting exceeds the value of the additional certainty the testing would provide.
Most teams never calculate that crossing point. They just keep waiting, because waiting feels safer than acting on incomplete information.
The decision you don’t realise you’re making is the decision to absorb those costs. Name it as a decision and the calculus changes.
Facing a decision but waiting for more information?
One Good Decision is a free 7-day email sequence that walks you through a specific decision you're facing — including how to act when you don't have the full picture.
What You Actually Need to Decide
Not all information gaps are equal.
This is the insight most frameworks miss. Leaders treat every unknown as a reason to pause — but some unknowns are decision-relevant and some are noise. The job is to tell them apart.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb described probability not as the computation of odds, but as the acceptance of the limits of our knowledge — and the development of methods for dealing with that ignorance. That’s the frame: not how to eliminate uncertainty, but how to act well within it.
Annie Duke takes it further. In Thinking in Bets, she argues that every decision is a bet on an uncertain future. The question isn’t whether you have complete information — you never will. The question is whether what you have is sufficient to make a reasonable bet.
Here is a three-question triage for any decision made under uncertainty. Work through them in order.
Question 1: Would this information change my decision?
Not “would it be interesting” or “would it be reassuring.” Would it actually change what you decide? If you’d make the same call regardless, the information isn’t decision-relevant. Stop waiting for it.
Question 2: Can I get it in time to matter?
Some unknowns will resolve before the decision needs to be made. Others won’t. If the information you’re waiting for will arrive after the window closes, its arrival is irrelevant.
Question 3: What is the cost of waiting to get it?
This is the question most leaders skip. Waiting has a cost. Name it. If the cost of waiting to get the information exceeds the benefit of having it, act now.
Run those three questions on any decision you’re currently holding and the field of genuinely useful unknowns narrows fast. What remains is worth pursuing. What doesn’t can be set aside.
For a deeper look at thinking in probabilities and how to work with incomplete data, the probability article covers the methods in full.
Choosing the right decision making framework for an uncertain situation is part of the same triage — reversible decisions warrant speed, irreversible ones warrant more caution, but neither warrants waiting indefinitely.
Acting With What You Have
Faced with a decision and incomplete information, ask yourself one question: would I bet £1,000 on this outcome?
The betting frame forces you to assess not just what you know, but how confident you actually are in that knowledge. It’s easy to say “I think this will work.” It’s harder to say “I’d stake £1,000 on it.”
The gap between those two statements is the uncertainty you haven’t yet acknowledged.
If you’d take the bet, act. Your information is sufficient.
If you wouldn’t, that’s useful data — not a reason to stall, but a reason to identify specifically what would change the odds. Go back to the triage. Is that thing knowable? Is it timely? Is it worth the cost of waiting?
Acting early carries real risk. Things can go wrong that additional information would have prevented. That’s not a reason to avoid acting under uncertainty — it’s a reason to plan for it.
Worst-case scenario planning alongside your decision reduces the cost of being wrong without requiring you to wait for certainty that may never arrive. The goal isn’t confidence that you’re right. It’s confidence that your process is sound.
How to Put This Into Practice
Here is the repeatable process. Apply it to any decision you’re currently holding.
Start by naming the decision explicitly — not the symptom or the problem, but the actual call you need to make. Vague decisions stay stuck. Specific ones move.
Then run the three questions. Would more information change the decision? Can you get it in time? What does waiting cost? If the answers are no, no, and more than you thought — act now.
If you’re still uncertain after the triage, apply the betting frame. Would you stake £1,000 on your preferred outcome? If yes, move. If not, name the one thing that would shift the odds — and decide whether that thing is worth pursuing before the window closes.
Then act. Not because you’re certain. Because certainty isn’t the standard.
Which decision are you currently delaying — and what information are you waiting for that might never arrive?
FAQs
Facing a decision but waiting for more information?
One Good Decision is a free 7-day email sequence that walks you through a specific decision you're facing — including how to act when you don't have the full picture.
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