In day-to-day life, people make buying decisions quickly. We pick up items we don’t need, subscribe to services we barely use, and tap our cards without much thought. These choices don’t carry consequences, so we move through them without hesitation.
In business, everything changes.
When a decision has real weight when it affects money, time, outcomes, internal expectations, or someone else’s scrutiny the pace slows
dramatically. It’s not because the decision is too complex or because people lack information. It’s because the decision suddenly becomes
personal. Someone knows they will have to carry the outcome, for better or worse.
This is where hesitation begins, and where most commercial decisions stall and don't progress.
There’s an old line that gets repeated in corporate circles: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” (Unless you worked in the QLD
government during the 2000's)
It captures something fundamental about decision-making inside organisations: people are often more concerned about how their decisions will
be judged than about whether the decision is actually right.
Most hesitation in a buying process isn’t caused by uncertainty about the solution. It’s caused by uncertainty about the judgement that might follow the decision. People fear choosing an option that fails, or an option that others might question in hindsight. That fear creates decision anxiety, and for many, the safest option becomes delaying the decision entirely.
When hesitation becomes a default behaviour, problems that should be addressed immediately end up lingering for months or years. Not because solutions don’t exist, but because no one feels confident being the person who commits to one.
This is where the commercial impact begins to show.
Inside most businesses, scrutiny doesn’t land where it should.
Low-value decisions, the ones with minimal downside are made quickly with little friction.
High-value decisions, the ones with the potential to improve the business attract far more caution, review, and internal debate.
Over time, this creates an odd pattern:
The decisions with the greatest upside often move the slowest, when they should have speed, focus and full attention.
The result is predictable.
Teams learn to live with avoidable problems. Issues that everyone recognises remain untouched. Opportunities are postponed until they lose
relevance or urgency. The business adapts to the pain instead of resolving it.
None of this happens because people don’t care.
It happens because no one wants to be the person who makes a visible decision that might not land perfectly.
Most organisations today suffer from an overload of information. Stakeholders have access to more comparisons, documentation, case studies, reviews, demonstrations, and analysis than ever before. Paradoxically, this abundance creates even more hesitation.
The question shifts from “What should we choose?” to “What might we overlook?”
And when decisions are judged heavily in hindsight, people become more cautious, not more decisive.
Information doesn’t reduce the personal risk attached to a decision; it often amplifies it. With every additional document or option, there is another potential angle someone might question later. In this environment, slowing down feels safer than committing.
Across industries and organisational sizes, one theme appears consistently:
important decisions stall because someone in the process does not feel safe owning the call.
This has nothing to do with seniority.
Founders experience it. GMs experience it. Middle managers experience it.
Even individuals with full technical authority, the people closest to the problem experience it.
The hesitation doesn’t come from lack of knowledge or lack of options.
It comes from a lack of psychological safety around the decision itself.
People move when they feel supported.
They hesitate when they feel exposed.
When exposure outweighs confidence, momentum disappears, even when the business desperately needs the change.
When decisions carry risk, buyers don’t need pressure, volume, or enthusiasm from salespeople. They don’t need more pages, more quotes, or more detail.
They need space to think clearly and someone who can help them interpret the decision, what it means commercially, operationally, politically, and personally. They need a conversation that reduces the perceived risk, not one that adds more complexity.
Good selling isn’t about persuasion.
It’s about helping people feel supported enough to commit.
When people feel safe, they decide.
When they don’t, even the best opportunities stagnate.
Every organisation carries a hidden cost:
the cost of decisions that never get made because the people involved don’t feel safe making them.
This cost shows up in stalled projects, missed opportunities, slower growth, frustrated teams, and problems that should have been solved long before they reached their current size.
The issue isn’t capability or intention.
It’s the absence of decision safety the space people need to move with confidence rather than caution.
And in many businesses, that’s where growth quietly disappears.