Decision Making Under Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Teams

Your team needs to decide whether to enter a new market. The data is inconclusive. Customer interviews are mixed. The competitive landscape keeps shifting. You could wait for more information, but the window might close. What do you do?

Welcome to decision making under uncertainty. For most teams, this isn't the occasional tough call. It's most calls. The vast majority of important team decisions happen with incomplete information, mixed signals, and outcomes nobody can predict with confidence. Yet most advice about decision-making assumes you've got all the facts neatly in front of you.

This guide is for the real world, where that's almost never the case.

Why uncertainty hits teams harder than individuals

When one person faces an uncertain situation, they can lean on gut feeling and move fast. When a team faces the same situation, something different happens. Each person brings a different tolerance for risk, different assumptions about what might happen, and different ideas about how much information counts as "enough."

If those differences aren't addressed, they create friction. The team discusses, gathers more data, discusses again, and still can't commit. Not because anyone is indecisive, but because uncertainty amplifies disagreement. Without a shared way to handle the unknown, everyone defaults to their own comfort level, and progress stalls.

Five approaches that actually work

1. Classify the decision: one-way door or two-way door?

Jeff Bezos popularized this concept, and it's one of the most useful mental shortcuts for uncertain decisions. A one-way door is hard or impossible to reverse: discontinuing a product, signing a long-term contract, letting go of a team. These deserve careful analysis, even when information is scarce, because the cost of getting it wrong is high.

A two-way door is easy to walk back through: testing a new landing page, launching a feature to a small group, trying a different meeting format. For these, the cost of waiting and overthinking usually outweighs the cost of being wrong. You can always reverse course.

Most teams treat too many decisions as one-way doors. Simply asking "Can we undo this if it doesn't work?" before each decision helps calibrate the right amount of analysis.

2. Apply the 70% rule

Waiting for 90% certainty before acting usually means waiting too long. The idea behind the 70% rule: once you have about 70% of the information you'd ideally want, go ahead and decide. Commit to course-correcting if needed.

That last 30% is typically the most expensive to get, both in time and in missed opportunities. For many decisions, it wouldn't change the outcome anyway. It would just make everyone feel slightly more comfortable, at the cost of weeks of delay.

Combine this with the door framework. For two-way doors, 70% is usually more than enough. For genuine one-way doors, you might want to push a bit higher. Learn more about balancing speed and quality in team decisions.

3. Run a pre-mortem

Before making the decision, ask the team to imagine it's six months from now and the decision has failed badly. Then have everyone write down why it failed.

This takes less than 30 minutes and does something really useful. It gives people permission to voice concerns they might otherwise keep to themselves. In a normal discussion, expressing doubt can feel like you're slowing things down. In a pre-mortem, imagining failure is literally the task.

Once you've surfaced the most likely failure modes, ask: can we do anything about these? If yes, build safeguards into your plan. If the risks are genuinely catastrophic and there's no way to mitigate them, that's valuable information too. Understanding cognitive biases in team decisions can help you run even more effective pre-mortems.

4. Find the smallest version of the decision

When uncertainty is high, teams tend to try making one big, all-encompassing call. Try the opposite: what's the smallest version of this decision that still moves things forward?

Instead of deciding to build a whole new product, decide to prototype it for two weeks with three customers. Instead of committing to a new company strategy, test one initiative for a quarter. Each smaller decision generates real-world data that reduces the uncertainty around the next one.

This works because it turns guessing into learning. You're not predicting the future; you're running small experiments that reveal it.

5. Document the uncertainty, not just the decision

This is the approach most teams skip, and it might be the most valuable one. When you decide under uncertainty, write down not only what you chose and why, but also what you didn't know at the time. Note your key assumptions. Spell out what would need to be true for the decision to work.

This does two important things. First, it creates a fair basis for evaluating the decision later. If it turns out badly because an assumption was wrong (not because the reasoning was flawed), that's a very different situation. Without documenting uncertainty, teams tend to judge decisions only by outcomes, which punishes thoughtful calls that had bad luck.

Second, it creates a natural trigger for revisiting. If you noted that your decision assumed a stable market and the market suddenly shifts, you know right away it's time to reconsider. Getting clarity before acting and evaluating options and trade-offs systematically supports this approach.

The biggest trap: not deciding at all

By far the most common mistake under uncertainty isn't choosing wrong. It's not choosing at all. Teams fall into analysis paralysis, convinced that just a little more data will make the right answer obvious. Under real uncertainty, though, more data often creates more ambiguity, because each new input raises new questions.

Meanwhile, waiting has its own price. Competitors act. Opportunities close. Team energy fades. A good decision made this week almost always beats a perfect decision made three months from now, because that "perfect" decision usually never arrives.

This doesn't mean being reckless. It means accepting that under genuine uncertainty, the quality of your decision process matters more than the completeness of your information.

How tracking helps you get better at this

When you track decisions made under uncertainty, along with the assumptions and the information you had, something powerful builds up over time. After six months, you can look back and see: which assumptions held? Where did we consistently over- or underestimate risks? Which types of uncertain decisions tended to work out, and which didn't?

That kind of pattern recognition is impossible without a record. And it's what turns a team from one that dreads uncertainty into one that handles it well. Start by tracking decisions over time to build this foundation.

DecTrack makes this natural. When you record a decision, you can note the level of uncertainty, your key assumptions, and the expected outcome. When review time comes, everything's there to learn from, not just to celebrate or to blame.

A five-step approach you can use right now

Next time your team faces an uncertain decision, try this: classify it as a one-way or two-way door. Check whether you have at least 70% of the information you need. Run a quick pre-mortem to surface hidden risks. See if you can break it into a smaller first step. And document the decision, including what you don't know.

None of this requires special tools or training. It requires the willingness to accept that uncertainty is normal, and that the goal isn't to eliminate it but to decide well in spite of it.

The best teams aren't the ones that always call it right. They're the ones that make thoughtful decisions under uncertainty, track how things turn out, and keep getting better. That's what turns uncertainty from something stressful into a genuine competitive edge.