Stop Predicting, Start Deciding
On breaking out of scenario spinning and deciding from what you actually know.
Grappling with Uncertainty
In a recent session, one of my coaching clients announced that they were seriously considering a lateral move inside their company. We had been working for some time on their feelings of uncertainty about their current role. They could see the ceiling above them and support from their boss had been inconsistent at best. In general, their pace of advancement had slowed and their engagement and motivation had dipped. So I wasn’t surprised that they found the idea of a change appealing.
On paper, the new role looked good. As we discussed the details and my client’s reasoning it came to look even better. They left the session feeling close to a well-informed decision.
The next time we talked, the framing had changed…
What if the current situation improved? They had history there, relationships, a reputation that had taken years to build. A new boss could change things. And how much did they actually know about the new role? The people seemed good from the outside, but was that reliable? What if it was just an unfamiliar version of the same problems?
The Problem With More Scenarios
What this client was doing was trying to future-proof the choice. If they could model enough scenarios, account for enough variables, they could find the option with the better future. But the analysis wasn’t generating any progress.
The assumption in this kind of thinking is that one option has a more knowable future than the other. The current role feels familiar, so its future feels more legible. The new role is unfamiliar, so its future feels unclear. But that’s a difference in feeling. Neither future is actually visible. Adding more imagined scenarios to the comparison just adds variables to a calculation that was getting more complex.
The anxiety driving this makes sense. These are consequential decisions and the impulse to get them right is rational. Unfortunately, predicting which future will be better has never actually been an option.
The Decision You Can Make
When prediction isn’t the tool, a clear read of present circumstances is. Not the imagined future of the current role or the new one. What’s true right now.
The current role has a ceiling they can see, a boss whose support has been inconsistent, and a pace of advancement they can’t justify. Those are observations, not projections. The new role has leadership that looks genuinely different, scope that maps to where they want to go, and a chance to reset something that has stalled. Also observations.
Decisions made from that kind of present-tense clarity tend to be more durable. You’re working with information you actually have. You can still be wrong because the situation can change in ways nobody could have seen. That's not the same as being wrong because you guessed at something you couldn't have known.
Getting Out of the Spiral
There’s a simple exercise that can help interrupt the scenario spinning. Write down everything you think you know about each option. Then go back through the list and ask yourself how confident you actually are in each item. Some of what you’ve written will be solid observation, things you’ve seen, heard, and experienced directly. Some of it will turn out to be assumption or inference, things that feel true but are really just plausible.
The observations are your actual decision-making material. The assumptions are the raw ingredients of future-proofing, and once you can see them clearly on the page, they lose some of their power. You’re getting clearer on where the uncertainty actually lives, and separating it from what you genuinely know. Most people find that the solid column is longer than they expected, and that it points somewhere.
What You’re Choosing
When my client finally made the move, they did it because they’d stopped trying to resolve the uncertainty. The question moved from which future looks better to which decision is most coherent with what they know and what they want. That question had an answer.
The future will be uncertain either way. The current role could improve. The new role could disappoint. What you can control is whether the decision reflects a clear read of where you are, what you’ve observed, and what you’re trying to build. Every decision worth making stands on that ground, and only that ground.