In every organisation I’ve worked with, there’s a familiar scene. A meeting ends with everyone agreeing that the decision is ‘important’—but not yet. We’ll revisit it next quarter. We just need a bit more data. Let’s wait until after the new strategy is finalised. 

Weeks turn into months. The world keeps moving. Competitors launch new products, markets shift, opportunities vanish. By the time the decision finally lands, the window that made it worth making has quietly closed. 

We tend to think of risk as something that comes from acting too soon. But the greater risk is almost always the opposite—not deciding at all. Indecision is the most expensive hidden cost in business. It erodes momentum, drains morale, and quietly kills innovation. 

I’ve seen it play out with start-ups, too. Founders who hesitate to launch because the product isn’t ‘ready’. Teams who keep tweaking the same feature, perfecting the same copy, while the market moves on. The fear is understandable: nobody wants to fail in public. But the irony is that the longer you wait, the smaller your margin for failure becomes. 

We’ve all inherited this illusion of control—that if we wait long enough, we’ll get certainty. But clarity rarely comes before action. It’s born out of it. The truth is that the world doesn’t reward perfect timing. It rewards momentum. 

Slow surrender 

I remember something a founder once told me after delaying a launch three times: “We waited until the perfect moment. Then someone else launched it.” That’s how most missed opportunities happen—not through bad ideas, but through hesitation disguised as prudence. 

Reinvention doesn’t derive from flawless plans; it derives from intelligent experiments. You test, learn, adapt. The companies that thrive aren’t the ones that make the fewest mistakes. They’re the ones that treat decisions as drafts, not verdicts. 

Indecision, on the other hand, is a slow surrender. It feels responsible. Measured. But it’s really a way of avoiding discomfort—the discomfort of uncertainty, of being wrong, of having to change direction. 

The cost isn’t just strategic. It’s cultural. When teams see leaders who can’t decide, they stop taking initiative. When leaders wait for the world to slow down, the world moves faster. 

There’s a line I often share with founders: The longer you wait to decide, the smaller your range of choices becomes—until change decides for you. 

That’s what happens when organisations confuse delay with diligence. They lose agency. And by the time they act, the decision has already been made—by customers, competitors, or circumstance. 

The most resilient leaders aren’t the ones who always get it right. They’re the ones who move, learn, and adjust in real time. Because the cost of being wrong can usually be recovered. The cost of standing still rarely can. 

Photo: Dreamstime.