How better decisions happen when you stop pretending emotions don’t exist
Decisions have been coming thick and fast for most of the founders I work with.
They run businesses in volatile, uncertain markets that change faster than anyone can comfortably keep up with.
And yet the decision-making habits most founders rely on are ones their grandparents would have recognised – habits that come from more stable times, with slower feedback loops, and a business culture that treated the emotional side of a decision as noise to be filtered out.
Most founders have had some version of that drummed into them from early careers: be rational, be data-driven, think like a machine, not a human. I had it drummed into me too. Value-based management, discounted cash flows, the whole apparatus of mechanising leadership.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with founders wrestling with this and after a lot of reflecting on my own decision-making in a 26-year operator career: we’ve got it backwards.
Suppressing the emotional side of a decision doesn’t produce better decisions.
It produces the 3am regret spirals we all pretend we don’t have when making the big calls.
This article explains why, what good decision-making actually looks like in a scaling business, and how to devolve decision rights properly – which is the single most common unmet need I see in the founders who hire me as an advisor.
The myth of the rational decision-maker
The business world has long convinced us that good decisions come from checking our emotions at the door.
Don’t let how you feel about it cloud your judgment. Run the numbers. Trust the spreadsheet.
I absorbed all of this in 1998 as a graduate trainee and spent years believing it.
The funny thing is, even the most data-driven decision-makers I know are actually deeply emotional about their methods.
They’re passionate about their spreadsheets. They’re attached to their frameworks. They’re proud of their analytical rigour. But they are also blind to the emotions that are absolutely present in their thinking, whether they acknowledge them or not. The emotions don’t go away just because you refuse to look at them. They go underground, and then they drive the decision from underneath while the founder tells themselves it was the numbers.
Since I trained as a coach, I’ve started thinking about emotions differently.
They’re not inconvenient noise to be filtered out. They’re a different kind of data to be weighed alongside the spreadsheets. They’re rich information about your values, your concerns, your gut instincts – all shaped by years of experience you can’t fully articulate.
When you get an uneasy feeling about a candidate who ticks every box on paper, what is that emotional system telling you? When you feel genuinely excited about a new direction despite the risks, what information is buried in that excitement?
Here’s the crucial bit, and this is where most of us go wrong.
We can’t follow emotions blindly any more than we can ignore them completely. The good decisions happen when we combine the emotional side with the practical side – when we get good at making the messiness of being human actually practical. That combination is a skill. It’s trainable. It’s what I spend a lot of my coaching conversations on.
Three things founders get wrong about decision-making
1. Treating every decision the same. Some decisions are reversible in a week, cheap to get wrong,= and should be made fast with whatever information is to hand. Other decisions are irreversible, expensive and warrant real thinking. Founders who treat these two categories the same either paralyse themselves over trivial calls or rush the ones that matter. The first piece of better decision-making is learning to tell the difference and calibrating how much care each decision deserves.
2. Making decisions alone when the information is in the team. As the business grows, the decisions that most affect it move further from the founder’s direct knowledge. If you’re the one deciding how to price the new service line when the person closest to the market is two layers below you in the team, the decision is being made with worse information than it needs to be. Devolved decisions aren’t just faster – they’re often better, because they’re made by the person who knows the most about the thing being decided.
3. Trying to keep every decision inside the founder’s head. The single biggest decision-making constraint in most scaling businesses isn’t the quality of each individual decision. It’s the aggregate load of decisions the founder is carrying. Founders who don’t actively work to shed that load end up bottlenecked by their own bandwidth, and the business runs at the speed of their worst week.
Devolving decision rights: the real unlock
Most of the founders I work with are grappling with exactly the same challenge: shifting to a wider group of people making decisions.
They’re doing it because they face a relentless onslaught of calls to make, and it’s not sustainable to have them all flow through one person.
Here’s the frustrating truth – telling your team they can make decisions is not the same as actually devolving decision rights. Most founders who say “I’ve empowered them” are discovering that the empowerment hasn’t translated into behaviour, because the conditions for devolved decisions haven’t been built.
Four conditions have to be in place for decision rights to actually move:
Clarity about what is being devolved. Not “you can make decisions” but “you own all hiring decisions up to this level, pricing decisions up to this range, client acceptance up to this size”. Specific boundaries, written down, referred to.
A shared decision-making framework. Not a flowchart. A lightweight shared way of thinking about the class of decision – what good looks like, what to weigh, what the founder would want the person to consider. This gives the team a scaffold they can use without needing to second-guess the founder.
Permission to be wrong. Teams that can’t be wrong don’t make decisions. They escalate. The founder who escalates decisions up because “I just wanted them to check with me” is the same founder who then complains that no-one takes ownership. Permission has to be explicit, repeated, and defended when somebody uses it and gets something wrong.
A feedback loop. Devolved decisions only get better if the people making them get feedback on how they’ve landed. Without that, the quality of decisions calcifies. Build a lightweight rhythm of reviewing recent decisions as a leadership team – not to second-guess them, but to build shared pattern recognition.
Lenses: the founder’s best decision-making habit
A colleague once told me I was obsessed with lenses.
Apparently I say things like “let’s look at this through a client lens,” “if we use a shareholder lens,” “what does this look like through a team lens?” I’ll take the accusation. The habit of consciously switching lenses on a decision is the single cheapest piece of decision-making improvement a founder can install, and it’s the one I recommend most often.
Most founders make decisions from one or two lenses by default – usually the shareholder lens and their own operator lens. Both are valid. Both are incomplete. When you deliberately add a client lens (“how will this feel to our customers?”), a team lens (“what does this do to the people doing the work?”) and a future-self lens (“how will I feel about this decision in a year?”), you get a materially better picture before you commit. It takes 10 minutes. Almost no one does it.
The founders I’ve seen make the best decisions over a sustained period are the ones who’ve built deliberate lens-switching into their decision habits – usually through a short set of questions they run any important call through before they land it.
“Simon has a unique ability to bring the best out of the people around him. He is extremely knowledgeable, and exudes a calm and measured confidence in any situation. I have always been impressed by Simon’s ability to hold a room and bring people together, with a perfect balance of knowledge and curiosity.”
Sarah Harris, Managing Director at The Wellbeing Project
Decision hygiene: three small habits that compound
If you want to make better decisions consistently rather than relying on individual heroic acts of clarity, three small habits compound.
Sleep on the big ones, decide fast on the small ones. The big ones deserve the overnight – they’re usually better after your brain has processed them once without your conscious involvement. The small ones deserve no more than five minutes of deliberation, because further deliberation doesn’t improve them and does eat the bandwidth you need for the big ones.
Write down why you decided, briefly. Not a memo. A couple of lines – the reasoning, the alternatives considered, the trade-offs accepted. A month later, when the decision plays out, you can read it back and compare. This is how pattern recognition builds over time, and it’s astonishing how few founders do it.
Separate the decision from the meeting. Meetings are a terrible place to make hard decisions. Use the meeting to surface the data, the arguments and the considerations; then take the decision away from the meeting, think about it properly and come back with it. Most of the worst decisions I’ve seen founders take were taken live in a meeting because everyone was looking at them.
Next step. Better decision-making isn’t a framework. It’s a handful of disciplines that compound when they’re built into how a founder runs their week. The good news is the disciplines are teachable, devolvable, and durable – once they’re in the operating system of the business, they keep paying out long after the founder installed them.
