Nothing matters more in a decision than the action you take.
Without it, choices remain unspoken dreams — breeding anxiety that stalls careers.
I’ve seen an MD delay an ERP change, lose millions in sales, and eventually leave the business.
For all his known decisiveness, one fear beat him: losing his domain expertise. He stayed still while the business moved on.
His undoing wasn’t a bad decision. It was never acting at all — and watching his anxiety and regret rise with every quarter.
That’s the quiet risk for every leader: when fear of being wrong kills the action that could save your career.
There is, however, another challenge with action.
You make decisions to create outcomes. Entitlement can leave you thinking that the decision decides the outcome.
Ask your boss about their best decision, and you'll hear about the risky acquisition that worked because it paid off. But if it had tanked? Pure bad luck.
Outcome bias is the term experts give to this false narrative.
We really are the story we tell ourselves – and action is what rewrites it.
They’ve simply forgotten about their locus of control.
In decision-making, action is within your locus of control.
Action lives in your locus of control – what you make happen vs what happens to you.
Once you start to see action as an integral element, your view of decision-making changes. You’ll see the three parts of a decision and appreciate how action binds them together.
Good decisions = info + action → outcome.
Most jump from info → outcome. But you need to end with action because action binds info to results.
Skewed facts or fixed goals blind you, like defending sunk-cost hires.
They just mean your decision wasn’t a good one.
But don’t let that distract you from what really matters.
Action is what you control. It rewrites everything and kills regret dead.
The foundations of every decision mean:
Run this 3-check with your team on Monday.
