Make the decision right

2026-05-26T08:30:00.000Z

“Spend most of your effort making the decision right rather than on making the right decision.”

An ex-CEO I worked with used to say this often.

At first, I didn’t fully agree.

As engineers, we tend to believe there is a correct answer — and that with enough analysis we’ll eventually find it.

But over time I realised something important:

Projects rarely fail because every decision was wrong.

They fail because nobody was willing to commit to one.

I’ve seen teams spend weeks debating:

• architectures
• suppliers
• frameworks
• tooling
• build-vs-buy decisions

Not because the stakes were existential, but because nobody wanted to own the risk of being wrong.

One project I worked on needed an external cryptographic key store. The business couldn’t decide whether to:

• buy an expensive enterprise KMIP solution, or
• use a simpler in-house alternative

The discussion went on far longer than it should have.

Eventually we stopped waiting for certainty, picked a workable direction, and got moving.

And unsurprisingly, once progress started, many of the “critical” unknowns became much easier to deal with.

That same CEO had another line:

“If you make the wrong decision, you may fail. If you make no decision, you will definitely fail.”

I think about that often in engineering.

Momentum matters.

Perfect decisions made too late are usually less valuable than good decisions made in time.