How To Slow Down Decisions When Others Demand False Urgency

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Urgency is often a performance. Leaders equate speed with competence, but research suggests that ‘pumping the brakes’ is the actual hallmark of high-quality leadership.  Yet, with an estimated 35,000 decisions made daily, humans tend to speed up their decisions, especially when under pressure from others, even more so with people in power.

Slowing down when making a decision is important to making quality decisions. First, humans are not good at estimating how long activities like decision making will take; timelines are often arbitrary. Second, bias creeps into quick decision making, wreaking havoc on the quality of the decision. Finally, more structured decision making is associated with improved decision implementation efficiency and quality.

A recent ScienceDirect study found that setting tight deadlines ignores entire categories of relevant data that could have informed the decision making process. Giving a decision maker more time directly enhances their ability to conduct contingency planning, get the necessary context, and explore alternative options for the decision.

Not Every Decision is Truly Urgent.  Research shows that “people are less successful at prioritizing important tasks over those that are urgent or just feel urgent.” This “illusion of urgency” can overshadow and shorten decision making timelines.  How do you know if a decision is urgent?  Urgent decisions have a formal, quick deadline (business deal or price change) or detrimental consequences for indecision (life lost or opportunity disappearing).  If you feel you have more time to make your decision, consider clarifying the decision making timeline with others by asking, “What if we waited to make this decision later?” Listen for legitimate reasons to rush the decision, emphasizing the context that is missing to make the decision now.  While resisting arbitrary deadlines, you cannot wait for certainty. Jeff Bezos’s ‘70% Rule’ provides the perfect guardrail. If you have less than 70% of the information, you are likely being reckless. If you wait for 90%, you’ve likely missed the window. The goal is to find the sweet spot between the illusion of urgency and the paralysis of perfection.  If you don’t have enough information, ask for clarification before making a decision.

Fast Decisions are Riddled with Bias.  There are a plethora of biases activated in fast decision making. Confirmation bias, where people look for information that confirms what they already know, anchoring bias, where people’s first impressions influence their decision, and sunk cost fallacy, where people increase their commitments to decisions based on past investments (time, money, or effort) rather than the current benefits.  When you slow down decisions, you invite objective thinking, also known as System 2 thinking, which is a slower, more conscious, and effortful mode of reasoning that generally results in improved outcomes.

Use Criteria to Slow Down Decisions.  By now, you might be thinking, this sounds nice, but how do I resist the time pressure of others who want quick decisions?  First, if you have clarified that you have more time to make the decision, be transparent about the new timeline for the decision. Then, get the information and additional context that you need, inviting objective criteria into the decision making process.  Decision criteria are helpful in aligning multiple stakeholders on the decision and gathering information you need but do not have yet. Two common criteria are 1) ease of implementation (resources, timeline) and 2) impact (on the business, customer). You can rate alternative decisions on these two factors, or get more granular, and map the alternatives on a two-by-two matrix displaying those with high ease and impact as logical choices.

Before you make your next decision, reflect first: Do I have to make a quick decision, or do I have more time? What biases might I need to check? What context am I missing? What are the necessary decision criteria, and what alternatives could I explore?

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