Decide How to Decide Before You Decide

By Will Bledsoe, Ph.D. (2026) 

In family businesses and workplaces, the decision is rarely what blows the room apart. The decision is the occasion. What walks in with it is older: who was heard last time, who was overruled, who still feels a slight no one has named in years. A hiring question, a succession question, a budget question becomes a referendum on respect.

A decision forces interdependence into the open. Someone will get more of something scarce — authority, money, time, the story of whose judgment counts — and someone else will feel the interference. If the old resentment was never addressed or worked through, the new decision is where it resurfaces. People do not argue the criteria. They argue the wound, dressed up as a position.

The move I ask clients to make is simple to say and harder to keep.

Decide how to decide before you make the decision.

Before options and before anyone’s preferred outcome is on the table, ask two questions. What would constitute a wise decision in this case? What criteria do we need to base our decision on?

A position is essentially a demand. A criterion is the standard the group would still accept if the names were reversed. That prior discussion does something immediate. It starts a spirit of collaboration before anyone has been asked to argue their position and win. Collaboration here is not warmth. It is a shared task: build the test, then run the options through the test. People can still want a particular outcome, but they are no longer licensed to treat that want as the process.

One caution. Criteria can be smuggled positions. If the standard only serves to deny or passively disparage the other side, it is not yet a criterion.

The choice may still disappoint someone, but disappointment is not a spiral. A spiral starts when people discover, mid-argument, that they were never in the same conversation. The discussion about how to decide before the decision does not erase that history. It refuses to let the history run the vote.