How to make better decisions when the data is unclear

The hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make weren’t the ones with too many options or too much disagreement. They were the ones where the data was incomplete, conflicting, or simply didn’t exist. A market we hadn’t entered yet. A cultural problem that didn’t show up in metrics. A fork in the road where both paths were uncertain, but standing still wasn’t an option.

And yet, those were often the moments where a decision mattered most. In real business life, clarity rarely arrives on schedule. We are often expected to act long before we have all the information we want.

Over the years, I’ve had to develop a different kind of decision-making muscle. Not the one that compares dashboards, but the one that listens for patterns, frames uncertainty, and helps teams move even when no one is sure. In this article, I want to share the tools, questions, and stories that have helped me make better decisions when the data couldn’t.