The decision that's been sitting on your desk I had someone in my office last week who'd been running their operation for three years without properly addressing whether they should pivot their service offering. They knew something wasn't working. Their margins were thin, their team was stretched, and they'd had conversations about it for months. But they hadn't made the call. Why? Not because the information wasn't there. They could see the numbers. They knew the market. They'd even talked to customers about it. The real problem was they hadn't structured their thinking around the decision itself. This is what I see most often. People running their own thing accumulate information, but they don't organise it in a way that actually moves them toward a decision. So the difficult calls just sit there, gathering dust, creating a kind of background anxiety that leaks into everything else. The good news is this is fixable. Not by getting more data. By thinking differently about the data you've got. Why we avoid the hard decisions Structured thinking sounds like jargon, but it's really just this: taking a messy, emotional, multifaceted problem and breaking it into pieces you can actually examine. Most of us don't do this naturally. We live in the problem, turning it over and over, hoping clarity will arrive on its own. It won't. Right now, with energy costs spiking and the housing market showing real signs of fear, I'm seeing people avoid decisions about expansion, hiring, or investment because the landscape feels too uncertain. They tell themselves they'll decide when things stabilise. But that's just another way of saying they're not deciding at all. The avoidance happens for a few reasons. First, difficult decisions usually involve trade-offs. You can't have everything. Acknowledging that explicitly feels like failure, so we stay in the fog where we can pretend we might. Second, once you decide, you own the outcome. That's real responsibility. Avoiding the decision lets you keep one foot in the world of "what if." Third, and this is the one I see most, we avoid structure because structure feels like it removes the human element. Like we're being cold or robotic. We're not. We're just being clear. The three-layer approach Here's what I do when I'm sitting with someone facing a difficult call. We work through three layers. First, clarify what you're actually deciding. Not the emotional version, not the version you've been rehearsing in your head. The actual decision. "Should we pivot our service?" is not clear enough. "Should we move 60% of our capacity from custom work to productised services, knowing this means we'll need to let go of three existing clients and rebuild our sales process over the next eight months?" That's clear. Second, separate what you know from what you don't. Write them down. Separate columns. I mean actually write them. When you see them on paper, you stop rehearsing the same uncertainties and start asking what information would actually change your mind. If energy prices stayed at $100 a barrel, would you still avoid that hire? Or is that not the real constraint? This is where a Decision Matrix or even a simple SWOT Analysis can help you see the actual shape of the problem, not the shape you've been imagining. Third, identify the reversibility of the decision. Some calls are hard because they feel permanent. They're not always. If you hire someone, you can let them go in three months if it's wrong. Yes, there's cost and disruption. But it's not permanent. If you pivot your service, you can test it with a subset of your business before committing fully. Once you separate the truly permanent decisions from the ones that are just uncomfortable, the weight on them changes. What I've actually seen work One person I worked with was agonising over whether to raise prices. They'd had the same pricing for two years. Their costs had risen. Their value had clearly increased based on client feedback. But they were terrified of losing people. We structured it like this. We listed every client and what they'd said about value. We listed the exact cost increase they'd absorbed in the past two years. We looked at how many clients had actually left in the previous 12 months for price reasons. The answer was zero. Not one. Then we ran a scenario. What happens if we raise prices 15% and lose 10% of clients? The maths showed they'd still come out ahead because the margin improvement on retained clients outweighed the lost revenue. When they saw that, the decision became obvious. They raised prices. They lost one client. They gained 12% margin on the rest. That's what structured thinking does. It converts emotional noise into actual information. It turns "I'm terrified" into "here's what would have to happen for this to be a bad decision." The cost of not deciding I want to be direct about this: every week you don't make the difficult call costs you something. It costs you energy. It costs you clarity. It costs your team, because they can feel the indecision, and it creates a kind of passive waiting rather than active building. Right now, with the geopolitical uncertainty around fuel and the housing market showing real strain, I'm seeing people freeze. They think the right move is to wait. Sometimes it is. But most of the time, the right move is to decide based on what you know now, build in a review point, and move forward. Waiting isn't a decision. It's just delay with extra anxiety attached. What to do this week Pick one decision you've been avoiding. Not the biggest one. A real one, but a manageable one. Write down the actual decision in one sentence. No vague language. Then spend 30 minutes writing two lists: what you know for certain, and what you don't. Look at that second list. Which of those unknowns would actually change your mind? Can you find out? If not, can you make the call anyway and set a review date in three months? That's structured thinking. It's not complicated. It just requires you to stop turning the problem over in your head and start putting it on paper where you can see it clearly.