Avoidant Decision-Maker: postponing as a way of deciding

Postponing the decision is, in practice, your way of deciding: committing to one option while others are still open feels hard.

Keeping the doors open feels safer than closing one, even though that also carries a cost that sometimes goes unnoticed.

Postponing as a strategy, according to Scott and Bruce

Within Suzanne Scott and Reginald Bruce’s decision-making style model (1995), the avoidant style is marked by a tendency to postpone or dodge decisions whenever possible. It isn’t necessarily a lack of judgment: often the person already knows which option they prefer, but the act itself of closing a door, ruling out every other alternative for good, generates a resistance other profiles don’t experience with the same intensity.

How this pattern shows up

• Decisions get postponed even when there’s already enough information to make them with confidence.
• Keeping several options open feels more comfortable than picking one, even if that means more long-term uncertainty.
• External deadlines (an imposed due date) are usually what finally forces the decision.
• The relief of postponing is immediate, which reinforces the pattern even though the accumulated cost is bigger.

The invisible cost of not deciding

The real cost of this style isn’t always visible: not deciding is also a decision, and it usually means sticking with the default option, not necessarily the best one. Setting your own concrete deadlines, instead of waiting only for an external one to force your hand, is a strategy Scott and Bruce (1995) link to regaining some control over the process. It can also help to remember that most decisions are reversible or fixable, though this is worth judging case by case: the fear of “closing the door” doesn’t always reflect the real cost of getting it wrong.

The valley of disappointment: why it’s easy to avoid decisions with no immediate payoff

James Clear, in Atomic Habits (2018), describes what he calls the “valley of disappointment”: the stretch where you’ve already put in effort on something, but the results still aren’t visible, because real progress tends to build up quietly before it becomes noticeable. He explains that many people quit right in that stretch, not because the effort isn’t working, but because there’s no external signal yet confirming it. That same mechanism helps explain why this profile finds it so easy to postpone decisions with no immediate payoff in sight: deciding has a cost you feel right away (the risk of closing other doors), while the benefit of having decided well usually takes time to show up, sometimes weeks or months. Without a visible reward to offset it immediately, postponing looks like the safer choice, even though the accumulated cost of not deciding ends up bigger than that of any single choice. Clear insists that the valley gets crossed, not avoided, and that trusting the process while results still aren’t visible is exactly what separates the person who keeps going from the one who quits too soon.

If what you need to decide is other people’s backing, more than avoiding the decision itself, check out the dependent decision-maker profile. You can go back to your full result in the What’s My Decision-Making Style? test.