You can’t opt out of decisions

Despite being children of television, internet and smartphones ourselves, my wife and I are extra protective towards our 2 year old son. We’d much rather he play outside or with his toys than watch television. To make sure we stay aligned when television is allowed, we came up with a simple decision diagram.

Raising a kid turns out to be a never-ending stream of decisions. We don’t have a diagram like this for everything. Being intentional takes time and energy, so we reserve it for the decisions that really matter.

Parenting isn’t special in that sense. Decisions are everywhere. In a restaurant, someone decides who gets served first. A manager decides who works late. A system decides what comes next in the queue.

Decisions need to be made all the time. You can’t opt out. Even not deciding is a decision.

# Decision Heuristics!

Making decisions all day is exhausting. So we take shortcuts. We rely on what is called decision heuristics, simple rules of thumb that help us move fast without thinking too hard. Most of the time, they show up as “just the way we do things”.

“First-come-first-served (FCFS)” is one of these rules. It feels fair. But is it?

At a frituur (yes, the Belgian fries place, but replace this with any take-out restaurant), is it reasonable that someone ordering a single pack of fries waits half an hour because the person in front placed a party-sized order?

First-come-first-served assumes all requests are equally important. We ignore urgency, impact, or downstream cost. All for the sake of “easier to plan and execute”.

Another classic default is alphabetical ordering. Many of us experienced this in school. If your last name starts with an A, chances are you were often called on first to present your work or to answer questions. This “decision” has lingering effects. Students later in the alphabetical order often receive lower grades and get fewer chances to take the lead, which has a long term impact on their development and job opportunities.

In some parts of academia, authors are listed in alphabetical order (and not by size of their contribution), which disincentivises people later in the alphabet to co-author, as their name will be swallowed by their arch nemesis: “et al.”

These are just two decision heuristics. Others include hard-coded priorities in software systems, automatic functions in spreadsheets nobody understands anymore and the king of accidental decisions: “We’ve always done it this way”.

# From Accidental to Intentional

The real risk of sticking with accidental decisions isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they quietly block better options. For some critical decisions, we need to become more intentional. Deliberate. Just starting with planning optimization forces clarity. It’s a thinking tool, and with it, you can no longer dodge the hard questions:

• What do we want to optimize for?: Employee happiness? Throughput? Endless heaps of $$$?
• What constraints do we have?: Availability? Maximum capacity of our warehouses and vehicles?
• What trade-offs are we willing to make?: e.g. Do we accept more overtime, if that enables us to give people more days off?

Simply answering these questions already improves the quality of your decisions.

Second, a good planning optimization tool unlocks scenarios that are otherwise practically impossible to reason about with pen and paper or a thousand post it notes.

• A take-out service optimized for lower average wait time can prevent a single large order from blocking many small orders.
• Work rosters that respect employee preferences (in addition to availability) suddenly become manageable.

These options often get ignored not because they lack value, but because they’re too hard to reason about.

# Decision Intelligence, Not Decision Delegation

Becoming more intentional doesn’t mean handing decisions over to algorithms. It means refusing to hide behind them.

The role of a good planning optimization tool isn’t to replace human judgment, but to support it. By making trade-offs visible, constraints explicit, and alternatives comparable, it turns vague instincts into conscious choices.

Not just delivering a solution, but providing the context needed to question it, adjust it, and ultimately stand behind it.

Accidental decisions have a kind of gravity. Once in place, they keep pulling everything back to “this is how we do things.”

Decision intelligence gives us the leverage to push back against that gravity so we can decide deliberately, instead of drifting by default.