There’s a particular kind of paralysis that shows up in growing companies. A decision lands on someone’s desk, and instead of making it, they ask for one more report. Then another meeting. Then a second opinion on the second opinion. Nobody is being lazy — everyone is genuinely working — and yet three weeks pass and the question is exactly where it started. Meanwhile the market moved, a competitor hired the person you wanted, and the customer who raised the issue in the first place stopped calling.
The instinct behind this is understandable. Most people believe a manager is supposed to know things. If you don’t know, you delay until you do. But the premise is wrong, and unlearning it is one of the more useful shifts a person can make. A theme that runs through Garrett O’Rourke leadership thinking, shaped by years in sales organizations and call-center operations, is simple enough to state and hard to practice: the job is not to have every answer. The job is to gather enough information, make the call, and stay close enough to the outcome to adjust.
What running operations teaches you about certainty
Running a business teaches you that certainty arrives late — usually after the moment you needed it. In a call center, that lesson comes fast. You’re looking at hold times, conversion rates, staffing coverage, agent turnover, and a script that may or may not be working. You can study those numbers all afternoon. But at some point on a Tuesday you have to decide whether to change the opening line, move two people to a different shift, or pull a campaign that isn’t performing. You will not know for sure. You’ll know enough.
In my experience, the operators who do well aren’t the ones with the best forecasts. They’re the ones with the shortest distance between deciding something and finding out whether it worked. That distance is the real competitive advantage. A team that makes ten reasonable decisions and corrects three of them will outperform a team that makes two perfect decisions a quarter.
Sales leadership makes this even plainer. A rep asks you whether to discount to close a deal. There is no dataset that resolves that question. You know the account, you know the pipeline, you know what precedent you’re setting. You weigh it, you answer, and you own the answer. If you tell the rep you’ll get back to them next week, you haven’t been careful — you’ve just handed the decision to the clock.
Why smart managers freeze
It’s worth being honest about the reasons this happens, because they’re rarely stupidity. Over the years I’ve seen four causes come up again and again.
- Fear of being wrong in public. A manager who has been punished for a bad call learns to avoid making calls. That’s not a personality flaw; it’s a rational response to how the organization behaves. Culture creates hesitation more often than temperament does.
- Confusing importance with irreversibility. Most decisions can be unwound. Changing a compensation plan is reversible. Hiring a person is expensive to reverse. Signing a five-year lease is close to permanent. People often apply lease-level deliberation to script-level questions.
- Information as a substitute for courage. Asking for more data feels productive. It looks like diligence. Sometimes it is. Often it’s a way to postpone the discomfort of committing.
- No clear owner. When three people are responsible, nobody is. Ambiguity about who decides is one of the most common structural problems I’ve seen in management, and it’s usually invisible until something goes wrong.
There’s also a quieter reason: some leaders believe admitting uncertainty undermines their authority. It’s the opposite. A team can tell when you’re bluffing. Saying that you don’t know yet, that here’s how you’ll find out, and that here’s what you’re going to do in the meantime, builds more confidence than a confident answer that turns out to be invented.
Practical ways to decide with incomplete information
None of this is an argument for shooting from the hip. Disciplined decision-making is still discipline. A few things that hold up in practice:
- Ask what the decision costs to reverse. Sort decisions by that, not by how important they feel. Cheap-to-reverse decisions should be made quickly, sometimes by the person closest to the work. Expensive-to-reverse decisions deserve the extra week.
- Name the information that would actually change your mind. If you can’t name it, more data won’t help you — you’re not missing facts, you’re avoiding a judgment call. If you can name it, go get that one thing and stop there.
- Set a decision date before you start gathering. A deadline turns research into a process instead of a hiding place. On this date, with whatever we have, we choose.
- Write down what you expect to happen. One or two lines. If we move these agents to the evening shift, I expect answer rates to improve by this much within two weeks. This is where numbers matter — not to eliminate uncertainty, but to make it measurable. You’ll learn more from checking that prediction than from any amount of upfront analysis.
- Say who owns it. One name. Not a committee. The owner can consult anyone they want, but the decision is theirs and everyone knows it.
- Schedule the review. A decision without a review date is a guess. A decision with one is an experiment. Put it on the calendar when you make the call, not after it goes sideways.
Delegation belongs in this list too. If everything routes to you, you’ve built a system where your availability is the ceiling on the company’s speed. When you’re responsible for a team, part of the work is deciding which decisions you’re not going to make. Then you have to live with the fact that people will handle some of them differently than you would — and that if the outcome is fine, the difference didn’t matter.
The same discipline shows up in investing
As an investor in real estate and public markets, I’ve found the pattern repeats. You never have complete information about a property or a business. You have enough to form a view about the risk you’re taking and whether you’re being compensated for it. The difference is pacing. In operations, speed usually helps. In investing, patience usually helps — you can wait, and waiting is often the better move. What both require is the same honesty: knowing which uncertainties you’ve priced in and which ones you’re pretending don’t exist. That’s a personal perspective drawn from my own experience, not individualized financial advice.
Experience is largely a catalog of decisions you’ve watched play out. That’s the whole asset. A business executive with fifteen years of pattern recognition isn’t guessing less than a newer manager — they’re guessing better, and they recover faster when the guess is off. As President of Commercial Development Group, and before that across sales and call-center operations, most of what I’d call judgment came from having been wrong enough times to recognize the shape of a bad assumption early.
What your team actually needs from you
Here’s the part that gets missed. People don’t need a leader who is always right. They need a leader who is predictable about how decisions get made. Clear expectations, a known owner, a stated timeline, an honest account of what’s uncertain, and a willingness to revisit the call when the facts change. That combination lets a team move without checking in constantly, because they can anticipate how you’ll think about things.
The alternative — a manager who waits for certainty — trains everyone below them to wait too. That habit spreads quietly, and by the time you notice it, the whole organization has slowed to the speed of its most cautious person.
Good judgment isn’t knowing the answer. It’s knowing how much you need to know before you move, and being willing to be corrected by what happens next.
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