Every leadership team I meet this year says a version of the same sentence: we will decide when things are clearer. Tariffs, elections, AI, supply chains, energy prices. The list changes, the sentence stays.
Here is the uncomfortable part: things will not get clearer. Uncertainty is not a weather front that passes. It is the operating climate now, and waiting for it to end is itself a decision, usually the worst available one.
Waiting has a measurable price. McKinsey’s global decision survey puts the cost of ineffective decision processes at more than 530,000 lost working days a year at a typical Fortune 500 company: much of it time spent circling decisions instead of making them[U]. Its 2026 operating-model research draws the strategic conclusion: the advantage goes to organisations that decide and reorganise now, while the window is open, rather than waiting for a certainty that is not coming[O].
What waiting actually costs
Deferred decisions do not pause the business. Competitors move, teams fill the vacuum with assumptions, and the option you were protecting quietly expires. I have seen market-entry decisions lose most of their value not because the analysis was wrong but because it was still being refined when the window closed.
Deciding without certainty is a craft
The alternative is not recklessness. It is a different discipline. Separate what is knowable from what is not, and stop paying for analysis in the second category. Decide in reversible steps where possible, and mark the truly irreversible ones for the real scrutiny. Write down the conditions under which you would change course, so new information updates the decision instead of reopening it. And put one name next to the call.
| Worth analysing | Not worth waiting for |
|---|---|
| Your own cost and capacity data | Macro clarity that never arrives |
| Reversibility of each option | Certainty about competitor moves |
| Conditions that would change the call | Perfect information |
| The truly irreversible step | Consensus on everything else |
What this means for you
Look at your three most delayed decisions and ask: what specifically are we waiting to learn, and will that information actually arrive? If nobody can answer, you are not waiting for information. You are waiting for courage, and that has a different fix.
The market is not waiting with you
Whatever your organisation decides, the environment keeps moving. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index counts global corporate AI investment up 130 percent in one year to 581.7 billion dollars, against a backdrop it describes as accelerating capabilities and lagging governance[ST]. Deloitte finds close to three quarters of companies planning agentic AI deployment within two years[DE]. None of these actors has more certainty than you do. They have decided that moving with named risks beats waiting without them, and every quarter you wait, the option space is shaped by someone else.
What I see in the field
The most expensive sentence in strategy work right now is: let us revisit this next quarter. Uncertainty rarely resolves on its own. It gets resolved by commitments. The teams that move accept a simple trade: a good decision with named risks today beats a perfect decision that never arrives.
Deciding under uncertainty is a craft with structure: real options, explicit trade-offs, named risks, and a commitment device that survives contact with the next quarter. That structure is what we bring.
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Sources
- McKinsey & Company, Decision Making in the Age of Urgency (global survey), 2019. mckinsey.com
- McKinsey & Company, The Operating Model Advantage: Why AI Winners Are Rewiring Their Organizations, July 2026. mckinsey.com
- Stanford HAI, The 2026 AI Index Report. hai.stanford.edu
- Deloitte, The State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 (survey of 3,235 leaders). deloitte.com
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