The Predecision
A stutter step for decisions that feel ready but shouldn't be locked in yet
We were months out from a campaign that could reshape the entire operating environment. The C-suite was in the room for scenario planning. We walked through the risks, including the one everyone privately thought was unlikely: a total surprise outcome that would change everything.
We aligned on a two-part strategy. Part one: establish the frame early. Part two: deliver the proof that makes the frame credible.
The room loved it. Especially part one.
The group was so confident in the frame that when we pressure-tested it in the scenario drill—forcing them to imagine an effective counter-campaign—they got enthusiastic. Not defensive. Not worried. Enthusiastic. They saw the attack coming and believed it would only strengthen their position.
I pushed back. I explained why the frame couldn’t hold without the proof. They found a way to make it make sense. And honestly? In that room, I found their confidence convincing too.
Two weeks later, they moved forward with part one.
The proof never followed.
At first, I assumed it was a timing issue. That part two would come. But within days, it became clear: they’d doubled down on the frame without building the foundation underneath it.
By the time I realized the file had hardened, it was too late to change course. The strategy would only work as a complete system. Implemented partially, it created exposure we’d explicitly planned to avoid.
Within weeks, the surprise scenario we’d gamed out happened. Not because we failed to see it coming. We’d literally written it down and walked through it weeks earlier.
We got surprised because the client—and if I’m honest, I—had stopped treating the frame as provisional the moment it felt compelling.
The question everyone asks after is always the same: “Why didn’t we see this coming?”
But we did see it. We saw it in a conference room months before it mattered.
We just committed to a view before the environment finished forming.
When having a view becomes a liability
That's the pattern I keep seeing.
Last week I wrote about teams that freeze—smart people with good analysis who can’t move because they lack visibility into consequences.
This week is about the opposite problem: teams that move too fast, locking in a view before power finishes shifting.
Both failures erode influence. One through paralysis, the other through premature commitment.
Most legacy public affairs systems surface commitments. Where decision-makers sit. Who is aligned. Who might mobilize. What polling or sentiment suggests about public reaction.
This material creates comfort. The deck gets longer. The stakeholder map fills in. Someone says, “Okay, we know where everyone stands.” The file looks controlled.
The work shifts from pressure-testing interpretations to defending a position. The question moves from “what could break this?” to “how do we proceed?” And once our minds turn to that question, alternatives carry less weight. The person who had doubts stops voicing them. Or leaves them in Slack instead of bringing them to the meeting.
And so, even when the decision hasn’t been announced, or approved, it has hardened.
That hardening has less to do with confidence in the analysis and more to do with anxiety about indecision. Unresolved disagreement feels risky. A stable recommendation feels safer, especially when senior leaders want clarity and momentum.
Why more analysis doesn’t change the outcome
So teams add more structure.
More dashboards. More polling. More stakeholder mapping. More scenario work.
Scenario planning gets treated as the corrective. Multiple futures get explored. Risks are documented. Contingencies are discussed.
The exercise ends the same way. One scenario becomes dominant. A most-likely path emerges. A recommendation is selected. Alignment follows.
The futures may differ, but the lens used to evaluate them converges early. Once that happens, the scenarios start to feel manageable. "We know what to do in each case." But the uncertainty hasn't actually shrunk—just the willingness to acknowledge it.
I say this as a massive proponent of scenario planning. It’s one of the best ways to get teams to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. For exploring possible outcomes, it’s excellent. But even in the most effective sessions, the frame used to judge those outcomes stays largely intact.
The risk teams are actually managing
So when teams lock a decision in early, what are they actually avoiding?
The perception of indecision.
Indecision reads as drift. It invites scrutiny. It creates discomfort in rooms where the CEO asks, “So where are we on this?” and wants a clean answer. Holding competing interpretations open feels harder to justify than presenting a coherent plan.
So we end up in a situation where decisions stabilize in an environment that does not.
When the realities of that environment stop fitting the frame, changing course feels expensive. Someone has to go back to the CEO and explain why last month’s confident recommendation no longer holds. Surprises arrive.
It’s far from perfect, but I’ve developed a technique for dealing with this problem.
When a client agrees with our strategy too quickly—when I can feel the frame settling before it’s been genuinely tested—I force a collision.
I set it up with just enough warning to make what comes next land harder: “I’m going to openly disagree with my colleagues here, and even with myself, because you should see the full range of what we’re wrestling with.”
Then I make the best possible case against our own recommendation.
Not a token devil’s advocate performance. A real argument, delivered with conviction. The kind that makes my colleagues shift in their seats because they’re not sure if I’ve actually changed my mind.
Sometimes the client looks confused. Sometimes my own team does. But what it demonstrates is honesty. And thoroughness. And the fact that we haven’t drunk our own Kool-Aid.
Here’s why it works: if our frame is going to lose to a counter-argument, I would rather have it happen in this room, at this stage, than in a regulatory hearing or a media cycle six weeks from now.
The technique doesn’t eliminate premature agreement. But it does surface whether the client’s confidence comes from genuine conviction or from relief that someone has given them a clear answer.
When the frame holds up under the collision, the decision that follows feels earned. When it doesn’t—when the counter-argument exposes a weakness everyone suddenly recognizes—the file stays open long enough to fix it.
I absolutely hate hearing this in a post-mortem: "The signals were there. The data existed. The outcome made sense once it happened."
So can we develop a radar system for detecting power shifts before it's too late?
Power sensing as a decision discipline
Power sensing isn’t the same as awareness—knowing who matters, tracking what’s shifting, staying ahead of risk.
That framing treats power sensing as information gathering. The operational problem is different: it’s not whether you see the shift, it’s whether you can still act on it.
Power sensing shows up in how long teams keep decisions elastic.
It shows up in whether disagreement stays visible after a recommendation begins to feel ready. It shows up in whether early confidence is treated as confirmation or as a prompt for further scrutiny.
Teams with this capability intervene when decisions start to settle. They don’t rush to reopen debates later, when costs are higher and positions are entrenched.
That requires a mechanism that works before alignment sets in.
The predecision
The predecision is the part of the work most of us skip because it’s uncomfortable.
It starts at the moment when a recommendation feels ready.
Not announced.
Not approved.
Just ready enough that people stop pushing on it.
In the predecision, that feeling becomes the signal to slow down for a quick stutter step.
This is where the work changes shape. The goal is no longer to refine the recommendation or prepare to engage in next steps. The goal is to examine how the recommendation is being justified.
In practice, this means pausing the question everyone expects next—“So what do we do?”—and asking a different set of questions instead.
What frame are we using to interpret this situation?
What has to be true for this recommendation to work?
Which explanations did we discard quickly, and why?
What would make this plan collapse?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are asked explicitly, in the room, with the expectation that answers will be incomplete and uncomfortable.
I’ve seen this done well only a handful of times.
Two close friends of mine, Farhaan and Oren, do it instinctively. Any time I bring them a decision that feels settled, they refuse to talk about execution. They won’t help me optimize the plan. They won’t debate tactics.
They force me back into the frame.
They ask what assumptions I’m leaning on without realizing it. They ask which alternative explanations I stopped taking seriously once the story started to make sense. They ask me to argue the position I least want to be true, and then stay there longer than feels reasonable.
The experience is frustrating. It feels like regression. It feels like indecision.
What it actually does is surface the weak points while the decision is still elastic.
In organizational settings, this work often looks messy. People talk past each other. Confidence fluctuates. The room feels less aligned than it did twenty minutes earlier.
That’s the point.
The predecision keeps incompatible interpretations alive long enough to test the frame itself, not just the plan built on top of it. It creates space for disagreement before disagreement becomes politically expensive.
Once a team moves past this moment—once the recommendation becomes the thing everyone is preparing to defend—the opportunity closes. From that point on, pressure-testing feels like obstruction. Changing course feels like failure.
The predecision exists to prevent that lock-in.
It does not slow action.
It changes when commitment happens.
As I look back on some of the most effective teams I’ve worked with, they practice this consistently and still don’t eliminate surprises. And that’s counter-intuitively, the point. Instead, they recognize surprises earlier. And then the decisions that flow feel deliberate. Escalation feels proportional. And when things break, they break closer to the surface.
Which all increases the odds that the post-mortem won’t include that dreadful question, “Why didn’t we see this coming?”
Not because the future became clearer, but because the decision stayed open to challenge long enough for power to finish moving.
Where this sits in the capabilities index
I’ve started building a capabilities index for teams that need to make better decisions, quickly. It’s a work in progress, but I intend to use these as the basis for a new category of operating systems.
In that list of capabilities, I’ve identified Power sensing: Seeing where authority is moving before it becomes obvious.
Legacy systems track commitments and reward early decision lock-in. Power sensing depends on resisting that pull.
The predecision enables this capability by keeping frames under pressure before commitment. It treats disagreement as a signal, not a phase to resolve.
And as we explored last week, ripple effects make consequences visible so teams can act without false certainty.
The predecision keeps frames elastic so teams don’t commit before power finishes moving.
Together, they address both failure modes: never locking in, and locking in too early.