The Courage to Decide: Why Putting Things Off Is Often the Costliest Choice

Why do so many decisions sit untouched in a business?

The price increase that has been pending since spring. The employee who has not fit his role for a year. The customer who creates a lot of work and brings in little. The software everyone complains about. Most businesses have questions like these, and the answer is almost always known in principle. Still, nothing happens.

The usual explanation is a lack of courage. That is not wrong, but it does not help much, because it turns a thinking pattern into a question of character. This essay therefore pursues a more precise question: Why do owners put off decisions, and when is waiting actually the more expensive choice? To answer it, I first clarify what distinguishes putting off from wise waiting, then introduce the thinking model of status quo bias, weigh two views of waiting, and end with a simple test for everyday use.

Putting off or waiting: a difference that matters

Both describe the same outward behavior: no decision yet. The difference lies in the reason. Waiting means deliberately postponing a decision because a specific piece of information that will improve it can be expected by a specific date. Putting off means postponing a decision without anything essential changing before the next time it comes up.

The difference can be checked with two questions: What exactly am I waiting for? And until when? If you can answer both, you are waiting. If you hesitate at the first, you are putting off. This distinction is sober, but it takes the moralizing out of the matter. The point is not whether someone is brave, but whether the waiting has a purpose.

The thinking model: status quo bias

In 1988, the economists William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser published a series of experiments that show a simple pattern. They gave students decisions, such as how they would invest an inheritance. For some respondents, the text said the money was already invested in one of the options but could easily be moved. That option was chosen much more often when it was the existing state than when it was just one of several possibilities (as described by Camilleri and Sah 2021).

Samuelson and Zeckhauser define the status quo as what happens when you do nothing or stick with your previous decision. Status quo bias is the tendency to prefer this state even when an alternative would be better on sober reflection. A related effect is omission bias: harm caused by acting weighs more heavily in our perception than equal harm caused by doing nothing.

For an owner this has an uncomfortable consequence. If you raise prices and lose a customer, you have made a mistake everyone can see. If you do not raise prices and lose margin every month as a result, you seem to have done nothing wrong. Both losses are real, but only one of them feels like a loss.

An everyday analogy: many people stay in an expensive electricity plan for years, even though switching takes ten minutes. Nobody consciously chose the expensive plan. It simply stayed, and every bill is a silent confirmation of this non-decision.

The status quo is not a neutral starting point. It is a decision you make anew every day without noticing.

Does experience protect against clinging to what exists?

One might expect experienced decision-makers to be less susceptible. They know their field and can judge alternatives better. Camilleri and Sah (2021) tested this. They presented 302 physicians and 733 members of the general population in Australia with one medical and two non-medical scenarios. For half of the participants, one of the two options was marked as the existing state.

All groups showed the bias. Among physicians, however, it was stronger, and only in the medical scenario, that is, in their own field. The authors suspect two reasons: experts rely more heavily on practiced patterns, and they trust that a decision already made, for example by a colleague, came about carefully. Camilleri and Sah also point to earlier studies that demonstrated the bias among entrepreneurs, investors, and financial analysts.

The study's limits are clear: these are invented scenarios in an online survey, not real decisions with consequences. Transferred to a business, the finding is still a warning sign. Precisely where an owner knows the most, in their own offering, with their own customers, in their own processes, the tendency to stick with the existing may be greatest. Further thinking errors of this kind are described in the article Thinking errors of entrepreneurs.

Observations from practice fit this picture. In a survey of 149 leaders of a US association of medical librarians, the status quo was the most frequently observed bias in decisions, ahead of clinging to sunk costs (Eldredge and Hill 2025). And an interview study from the Netherlands names procrastination as one of three reasons why owners fall short of their potential in selling (de Groot and Wakkee 2024).

Two views: does waiting have value?

It would be too simple to dismiss every hesitation as a thinking error. There is a counter-position that deserves to be taken seriously.

First view: waiting can be wise

Investment theory knows the idea of a real option, which Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck described in detail in 1994. If you postpone an investment that cannot be reversed, you keep a choice. It has value because information may arrive in the meantime that prevents a wrong decision. If you buy a building, you cannot simply return it. A few months of waiting until the order situation is clearer can therefore be worth more than the head start from a quick purchase.

Second view: most of the time waiting is just habit

The value of waiting assumes two things: that the decision is hard to reverse and that waiting actually brings new information. Most decisions that sit untouched in a business meet neither condition. A price increase can be adjusted, a customer can be won back, software can be tested. And the information you are waiting for does not arrive by itself. If you still have the same questions in the fall as in the spring, you have not waited; you have put things off.

I consider both views correct, but they apply with different frequency. The real option is the argument for the few large, irreversible questions. In the article Deciding under uncertainty they are called one-way doors. For all other questions, status quo bias is the more likely explanation of hesitation.

What a postponed month costs

The costs of putting things off stay invisible because no document shows them. A worked example makes them visible. A business with 1.2 million euros in annual revenue has known for months that its prices are three percent too low. If no customer leaves, the increase would bring 36,000 euros a year, or 3,000 euros a month. How to prepare and justify a price increase is described in the guide Raising prices without losing customers.

Even if a customer accounting for a few percent of revenue leaves because of the increase, the business is usually better off after a year than without it. The exact calculation depends on the contribution margin. What matters for the attitude is something else: once you write this number down, you no longer compare a visible risk with nothing but two costs with each other.

The Status Quo Test: three questions against putting things off

Courage cannot be ordered, but a procedure can. The Status Quo Test consists of three questions that you ask of every decision that has been waiting for more than a month.

1. The re-choice question

   Imagine today's state did not exist and you had to choose it actively. Would you choose this price, this customer, this staffing today? If not, holding on is a decision that needs a justification.

2. The monthly-price question

   What does another month without a decision cost, in euros, time, or friction? Write the number down, even if it is rough.

3. The information question

   What information will waiting bring, and by when? If you cannot name it, set a decision date within the next two weeks.

4. The way out

   Check whether the decision can be set up as a trial with a deadline and a stopping point. A reversible step is easier than a final one.

The first question is the most effective because it attacks the bias directly. It puts the existing state on the same level as the alternatives. What remains is an ordinary weighing of options.

So that the decision can be reviewed later, it should be written down with a date, an expectation, and a stopping point. How to do this is described in the guide The decision journal. And if decisions sit untouched because they all land with the owner, a clear rule about who may decide what without asking helps. The article Defining decision paths shows what it looks like.

What you can do this week

1. Write down every decision that has been open for more than a month. Five to ten is typical.
2. Ask each one the re-choice question and note the answer in one sentence.
3. Estimate the monthly price for each and sort the list by that number.
4. Make the top decision by Friday or set it up as a trial with a deadline.
5. Set a fixed date for each of the others and put it in your calendar.

Conclusion: is putting things off really the costliest choice?

The question was
owners put off decisions and when waiting is the more expensive choice. The answer to the first part lies less in character than in a well-documented tendency: the existing state seems safer because its costs are invisible, and experience does not reliably weaken this tendency, possibly the opposite in one's own field.

The answer to the second part is a condition. Waiting is wise when the decision is hard to reverse and waiting brings a nameable piece of information by a fixed date. In all other cases it is the more expensive choice, just one for which nobody sends an invoice. The courage to decide therefore means, above all, drawing up that invoice yourself.