There’s a misunderstanding that comes back in conversations about selling, and in conversations about leadership. We say people avoid deciding. They’re indecisive. They drag their feet. They won’t commit. The word “indecision” comes up, treated as a personality flaw or a cultural defect.
The diagnosis is almost always wrong.
People don’t avoid decisions in themselves. They avoid deciding when the options in front of them are ambiguous. The difference is enormous, and changes everything that comes next.
People take clear decisions, even hard ones. Buying a house is a clear decision: high stakes, sharp consequences, distinguishable options. People take it, even though it weighs on them. Changing jobs is a clear decision, and it gets taken. Leaving a partner of twenty years is a clear decision, and sooner or later it gets taken.
What blocks people isn’t the size of the decision. It’s the feeling of not really understanding what they’re choosing.
I see this clearly in B2B sales conversations. A buyer arrives, gets shown an articulated offer: three packages, six sub-options, a pricing matrix that varies by number of users, duration, possible add-ons. The seller leaves the meeting feeling good. The buyer asked questions, asked for time to think, promised to reply within the week. The week passes without a reply. After a few follow-ups, the seller writes in their notes: indecisive prospect.
They weren’t indecisive. They were confused.
In front of a confused offer, the only possible reply is “I’ll think about it”. Not because the buyer is weak, but because any choice would leave the suspicion that the one next to it was better. The feeling of not being able to choose well paralyses more than any fear of price. It’s a form of self-protection. Better not to move at all than move at random.
I worked with a B2B software company that had a curious problem. Their product demos closed at 12%. Demos with the offer presented in the room closed at 6%. That is, putting the offer on the table made things worse. When I looked at the offer, I understood at once. It was a spreadsheet with three columns, ten rows each, prices broken down by tier, volume discounts. To read it you needed a desk. The buyer would receive that sheet, feel that any choice would be the wrong one, and use the universal escape: looks great, we’ll think about it.
When we rewrote the offer to a single page, with two distinguishable options and a clean price for each, demo closes jumped to 26%. We hadn’t changed the product. We hadn’t changed the price. We’d only removed the ambiguity.
The buyers’ ability to decide had been there all along. It was the offer that wasn’t allowing it.
The principle goes beyond sales. I see it in leadership teams that freeze in front of strategy plans written too openly. When a plan says we’ll evaluate entry into three new markets, possibly with one or more partners, depending on market conditions, the plan can’t be approved. Not because the people reading it are conservative. Because it isn’t clear what they’d be approving.
When the same plan says we’ll enter Spain by December, with partner X, budget 2 million, it can be approved or rejected. Either way, it becomes a decision taken.
When you notice the people around you “won’t decide”, don’t conclude they’re indecisive. Look at the options in front of them. Almost always, those options blur into each other, or require a level of interpretation that someone outside the problem can’t carry.
Removing ambiguity is the real work of selling, of leading, and sometimes of loving. Not because the decision is hard to reach. Because without clarity, it’s never reached at all.