You are paid to decide, and you are good at it. That is not in question. What is harder to say out loud, even to yourself, is that a meaningful share of the items on your desk this week are not really decisions, or are not really yours, or are not really urgent in the way they have arrived. Some of them are pressure systems wearing decision-shaped clothing. You feel the push as a single, undifferentiated thing, although when you slow down enough to look, it splits into pieces that have very little to do with the question on the page.
The cadence of executive life makes this very hard to see. The items keep arriving, they keep looking like decisions, and you keep being the person whose job it is to handle them. The job is real. The cadence is real. And underneath both, something else is real too, which most leaders sense but few have a clean word for.
The thing being pressed
A small example from outside the office. Some time ago, my partner and I were trying to decide whether to change our children’s school. We had genuine reasons to want to move them. We had also spotted, fairly early, the trap that comes with such decisions, which is that you end up comparing a current school you know the flaws of against a new school you have insufficient information about. That comparison is always going to be inconclusive, and the way the bias runs, it will tilt against the school you are in.
So we decided we would not decide. Not yet. The absolute deadline was the admission cycle of the new school year, and the question we wanted to be ready for was not “is this current school bad enough” but something closer to “what do we mean by being responsible parents to provide the best education we possibly can to our kids”. That is a slower question. It does not yield in an evening. While we waited, the negatives at the current school kept mounting up, which made the waiting painful, although the waiting was the right move.
What we were holding was not the decision. The decision became the easy part once the question changed shape. What we were holding was the pressure around it: the daily accumulation of small complaints, the gravity of always comparing to a school we already knew, and underneath both, our own discomfort with not acting on something we could feel was wrong. None of that was the school question. All of it was pressing on the school question. The two had to be separated before any answer could be honest.
I think this is the experience that lives under most executive moments where something feels off. The decision is often quite clear once the air around it is still. The thing pressing is everywhere except in the decision itself.
The word, and its two near-cousins
There is a word for this move, which is abeyance. I find I have to draw it carefully, because it sits between two near-cousins and is constantly mistaken for one or the other.
Abeyance is not indecision. Indecision is the inability to decide. Abeyance is a deliberate choice about when a decision should happen, and that choice is itself a decision. The two can look identical from outside; from inside they feel completely different. Indecision has a flavour of helplessness or paralysis. Abeyance has a flavour of attention, where you are watching the decision the way you might watch water come to the boil, not stirring it but knowing when it is ready.
I am clearer about this distinction in business than in personal life. When we were deciding where to live after Tokyo, the long search slipped, at some point, from abeyance into indecision. We had considered every factor we could think to consider, viewed enough places, and there was no missing piece we could go and find. We sat in something that was less a deliberate hold and more a hope that some new piece of information, or a person we had not yet met, would arrive and let us start eliminating options. It did, eventually. Although for a stretch in the middle I was not disciplined; I was waiting. That is the long, unintended form of abeyance, and not the same thing as the deliberate kind.
Abeyance is also not deprioritisation. Deprioritised items are quiet, where items held in abeyance are loud, because you have chosen on purpose not to let them collapse into an answer yet. Deprioritised items can be left to sit; items in abeyance need attending to in a particular way (the way you attend to a decision while still allowing it to ripen). The two can sit next to each other on a list and look the same to anyone reading the list, although they ask quite different things of you.
Abeyance is, for me, something of a luxury. I am the kind of person who arrives at airports early and submits documents before deadlines, partly because bad decisions creep in close to deadlines and partly because temperamentally I like a margin. That makes abeyance available to me in a way it is less available to people who live closer to the bone of their calendars. I do not want to pretend the discipline is evenly distributed. It is not. That does not mean it cannot be built.
The script we were given
There is a cultural script for what a good executive looks like, and abeyance is not in it. The script is the war-movie hero who makes the single brilliant call under fire, and underneath it the smaller daily versions: the newspaper piece about quick thinking saving the company, the keynote slide of the founder who “just knew”, the executive sitting in a darkened cinema half-watching a commander on a bridge and quietly measuring himself against the cut. The script tells us that decisive means quick, and quick means good.
What the script never says is what sat under the seemingly-quick decision. Years of training and a long chain of earlier decisions that had to be made in particular ways for the famous later one to be possible at all (the support structures, the deep familiarity with the immediate surroundings of the decision-maker, all of it invisible by the time the cameras are placed). If any of those earlier decisions had gone differently, the famous one would have gone differently too, or would have been a different decision entirely. The decision was not quick, although it looks quick from where the cameras are placed.
Executives feel pressure to perform against this fiction. It is widely shared, widely admired, and unfalsifiable in the way it is told. You can find yourself accelerating your own decisions to match the imagined speed of someone who, in their own life, was probably not accelerating at all. They were ready in ways that took years to build, and you may not yet be.
That is why I find triage awareness useful as a precondition for abeyance. Abeyance is not for every decision. It is the discretionary tool for the decisions that matter and have margin. Most days, most calls can be made quickly without much cost. The point is knowing which decisions deserve the room, and giving them the room you would not give the rest. The most demanding triage call, I have come to think, is when the decision in front of you is one you could make competently and should not.
A decision that was not yours
Some time ago I was advising a regional Japanese city that was building an ecosystem with substantial investment, where the future of the city more or less depended on it. The team had a flamboyant member, a man who attracted ideas and money from Tokyo, was often in magazines, and spoke his mind in ways not at all typical for a city official. He was idolised. He was also, I came to think, the largest single thing holding the project back, because almost none of his ideas were his own (he could not bring real ownership to the work in front of the citizens who needed to walk with it).
When I named this to the city officials I had grown close to, they quietly agreed the observation rang true. The harder question came after: what to do. We did not give them an answer. We made our own position clear, that the project would be a serious compromise if he stayed, and then we held the decision. We did not give them a deadline. They asked us what we thought, more than once, in different phrasings; we listened, and held.
The decision could have been ours. It would not have taken much. The deputy mayor would have followed a clear recommendation. We chose not to make it ours, because the long-term health of the city required the city officials to make this decision themselves and to be able to say, afterwards, that they had made it. In the end the flamboyant man removed himself, in the Japanese way, by being convinced rather than forcibly ousted. A decision that arrives on your desk is not, by virtue of arriving there, yours. Sometimes the most demanding move is to keep the desk clear of the things that should not be on it, even when handing them back is slower than handling them yourself.
I keep coming back to a line I have used too often to count, which is that it is not what you decide, it’s how you decide. If a meaningful share of the items on your desk this week are pressure systems wearing decision-shaped clothing, what becomes visible when you give them a little space is sometimes a clear call you could make in an evening, and sometimes a question about whose decision it was to begin with. The pressure was never the decision; it had only ever been standing next to it.
