The Frequency of Non-Decision

The fluorescent hum of the conference room has a specific frequency, a low-grade vibration that seems to rattle my molars whenever the silence stretches past the 38-second mark. We are currently at the 58-minute point of a meeting scheduled for 48 minutes, and the primary topic of discussion is whether the ‘Submit’ button on the internal portal should be ‘Sky Blue’ or ‘Cerulean.’ Marcus, who occupies a mid-level vice presidency and has apparently never seen an actual sky, is arguing that Cerulean conveys a sense of ‘urgent stability,’ a phrase that makes my left eye twitch with a fatigue that has nothing to do with the fact that a woman named Gladys called me at 5:08 AM this morning by mistake.

She wanted a recipe for lemon bars. I spent 18 minutes on the phone with her, not because I have a recipe, but because her voice was so remarkably certain of itself. She didn’t doubt that I was her nephew, and for those 18 minutes, I wasn’t a project manager drowning in a sea of non-decisions; I was just a guy who supposedly knew how to zest a lemon. There is a terrifying clarity in a wrong number at dawn that a corporate steering committee will never achieve in 128 years of scheduled syncs.

The Infinite Scroll of Inertia

We are stuck. Not because we lack data-we have 488 pages of heat maps and user journey audits-but because there are 18 people in this room and every single one of them has the power to say ‘no,’ but not a single one has the unilateral authority to say ‘yes.’ This is the Infinite Scroll of Corporate Inertia. It is the art of moving everything just enough so that it looks like progress, while ensuring that the center of gravity never actually shifts. We are terrified of being wrong, so we choose the safety of being nothing.

Sage F.T., a friend of mine who works as a sunscreen formulator, understands this better than anyone I know. She spends her days in a lab coat, obsessing over SPF ratings and the way zinc oxide interacts with skin lipids. In her world, if a formula is off by 0.008 percent, the product fails. People get burned. There is a literal, physical consequence to her indecision. If she doesn’t sign off on a batch by 4:08 PM, the production line stops. She doesn’t have the luxury of ‘escalating to a subcommittee.’ She makes a call, she documents the chemistry, and she lives with the result.

Expertise vs. Comfort

Watching Marcus debate the ’emotional resonance’ of a hex code makes me miss the smell of Sage’s lab-that sharp, clean scent of coconut and chemical precision. In the lab, truth is found in the beaker. In this room, truth is whatever survived the 8 rounds of revisions required to keep the C-suite from feeling ‘uncomfortable.’

“In the lab, truth is found in the beaker. In this room, truth is whatever survived the 8 rounds of revisions required to keep the C-suite from feeling ‘uncomfortable.'”

We have reached the point where the cost of the meeting itself has likely exceeded the lifetime value of the button we are discussing. At an average hourly rate of $228 per person, we have spent thousands of dollars to decide… absolutely nothing. We will leave this room with a ‘tentative alignment’ on the Sky Blue, pending a review by the Global Branding Lead who is currently on a 28-day sabbatical in the Maldives.

This diffusion of responsibility is a cultural pathogen. When everyone is a stakeholder, no one is an owner. We’ve built a system that rewards the ‘ask’ rather than the ‘act.’ If I make a decision and it’s wrong, it’s on my head. If I suggest a meeting to discuss the decision and the group reaches a consensus that is wrong, it’s a ‘learning opportunity for the organization.’ Guess which one leads to a promotion?

For instance, when a company needs to move or expand, the physical environment often becomes a battleground of indecision. Rather than letting this spiral into a six-month committee, many are turning to experts like FindOfficeFurniture to simply solve the problem with professional speed. They provide the expert advice that cuts through the noise, allowing businesses to stop debating the ‘vibe’ of a cubicle and start actually working in one. It’s a reminder that expertise is the natural enemy of inertia.

The Acceptance of Paralysis

I’ve made my own mistakes, of course. Last year, I spent 58 days waiting for approval on a vendor contract because I was afraid the procurement team would find a typo in the indemnity clause. I could have just picked up the phone. I could have been like Gladys-wrong number, right energy. Instead, I waited. I let the inertia carry me. I am part of the problem I am currently mocking, which is a contradiction I usually try to hide behind a well-formatted slide deck.

Sage told me once that the hardest part of formulating a new sunscreen isn’t the chemistry; it’s the marketing team’s fear of the word ‘greasy.’ She can create a product that is 98 percent effective and feels like silk, but if one person in a focus group says it feels ‘substantial,’ the project gets sent back to the drawing board for 68 days. She’s started lying to them. She tells them she’s changed the formula when she hasn’t. She just changes the label.

“The dirty secret of corporate life is that most people are desperate for someone-anyone-to just make a damn decision so they can go back to their actual lives.”

My 5 AM caller, Gladys, didn’t ask for permission to call me. She didn’t check my LinkedIn profile to see if I was qualified to discuss citrus-based desserts. She had a goal, she took an action, and even though she was technically 100 percent wrong, she achieved more in that 18-minute conversation than Marcus has in the last 48 days. She got to talk about lemon bars. Marcus just got to talk about talking.

The Architect of Stagnation

I look around the room. There are 8 laptops open, 8 people pretending to take notes while actually checking their Slack notifications, and 1 person-me-writing a mental eulogy for my own productivity. We are the architects of our own stagnation. We have built cathedrals of process to house the tiny, shriveled remains of our initiative.

Tomorrow, I’m going to call Sage. I’ll ask her about the viscosity of zinc. I’ll tell her about Gladys. And then, I’m going to make a decision about the project I’ve been sitting on for 78 days. I won’t send an email. I won’t book a room. I’ll just do it. If I get fired, at least it will be for something I actually did, rather than for the slow, agonizing death of my soul in a room filled with people arguing about the color of a button.

Is the fear of a bad decision really worse than the reality of no decision? We treat a ‘wrong’ choice like a terminal illness, but in most cases, it’s just a bruised knee. You can fix a bad choice. You can’t fix a ghost. And right now, this company is a haunted house, filled with the spirits of projects that were never allowed to live because no one would sign the birth certificate.