My biggest problems in business stemmed from decisions I was avoiding.

Not because I was lazy, but because deciding is expensive. It requires energy to confront facts, make a change and accept that you might be wrong.

I didn’t realize I was avoiding anything. It felt like I was constantly making decisions about people, money, and projects.

I was dealing with the unreliable employee, the difficult customer, the fluctuating financials, all while triaging timelines and deliverables.

These were obviously problems.

But instead of making the hard decisions that would solve them, I worked around them. And unconsciously created even more problems.

The Cost of Not Deciding

I endlessly coached the non-performer and when that didn’t work I tried to ignore them. I told myself someone was better than no one and I couldn’t spare the time to recruit and train a replacement. This made me feel inauthentic and it affected our culture.

The complex custom work we did resulted in many disconnects between what the customer said they wanted and what they actually needed. This led to confusion, cost overruns, contract modifications, and delays which didn’t benefit anyone. 

I was the bottleneck for all proposals, contracts, project plans and change orders. Since each one was different, I believed I had to review them all, leaving me no time for strategic thinking.

When I read Straight-Line Leadership by Dusan Djukich, it was a eureka moment.

He said most problems are decisions we avoid. Once we decide, it simply becomes a matter of taking the required actions.

But it’s easy to stumble on either the decision or the action.

For example, with the nonperforming employee, I knew the right decision was to let them go, but I wasn’t willing to take the required action.

When it came to the type of work we did, it never occurred to me that I could decide to do business a different way. I spent a lot of time trying to improve how we handled projects, making small incremental changes that amounted to very little.

When Improvement is Avoidance

After reading the book, I started questioning my assumptions and instead of trying to improve things, I dug for the decisions I was avoiding. I opened a document on the computer and asked myself a master question:

What would have to be true for this problem not to exist?

I forced my brain to think blue-sky with no constraints and I typed up everything that came to me so I could see it all clearly outside of my mind.

The most fascinating thing about this approach was how many of the problems in my business were related. What looked like five separate issues were all symptoms of one decision I wasn’t making. 

Because we did complex, custom work, it required highly skilled, expensive people, who were hard to replace.

Because the projects were large and the organizations big, each one represented more than 10% of our revenue, which I was unwilling to risk losing.

Because the engagements had long timelines and complicated deliverables, there were always delays and mistakes.

The answer to the question of what would have to be true for these problems not to exist scared me the first time it came to me.

I’d have to stop doing custom work that relied on expensive people and systematize the business so it could run without me.

The Big Decision

This would be one of the biggest decisions I ever made, and I put it off for more than a year because I wasn’t willing to take the required actions.

But eventually the pain of staying the same became greater than the pain of change and I made the move. 

It required hard decisions like rebranding the company and spending money to build standard solutions.
It also required hard actions: persuading existing customers to see the vision, turning other types of business away, letting some people go.

I wasn’t sure it would work. But I also knew there’s no such thing as one right decision. How we think, feel, and act afterward is what makes decisions work.

During this process I became aware of how much I relied on the business for my self-esteem. I was secretly proud of how complicated the work was because it made me look smart. I thought our roster of large clients made us look impressive.

All the emphasis was on what people thought about me and the company and not how I was feeling about it. I was sacrificing my life and feeling constantly tense, frustrated, and exhausted. 

After that my relationship to my business changed. It stopped being a vehicle for me to feel significant and became an asset I owned which added value to the world. 

This story isn’t about how I changed my business model, although I’m glad I did. It’s really about how decisions masquerade as problems.

Notice if you hear yourself talking about problems like, “Revenue is down,” “No one does it right,” or “There’s never enough time.” That language is usually a clue. 

Underneath are decisions to make, like changing how you deliver value, simplifying and systematizing, and structuring the business to run without depending on you.

When you don’t decide, you still pay. You pay with your energy, dealing with the ongoing drag of half-measures and problems you have to confront again and again.

The next time you find yourself trying to solve the same problem you’ve been solving before, try the question: What would have to be true for this not to exist? The decision will be there.

A problem is really a decision to make.