When work stalls, organisations reach for the same diagnosis: clarity is missing.
If only priorities were sharper. If only direction were more explicit. If only alignment were better. The assumption is that somewhere, the explanation isn't good enough – and if we fix that, things will move.
Clarity problems are real, and clarity solutions often work, but there's a category of ‘stuck work’ where more direction doesn't help, and additional explanation creates pressure without resolving anything.
Some work stalls because it's unclear. Other work stalls because it's undecidable.
What "undecidable" means in this context
Undecidable work is work where:
- There is no single correct answer
- All available options involve real trade-offs
- Gains in one area produce losses in another
- More information does not resolve the tension
- Someone must own the judgement and its consequences
This is not chaos or confusion. Nor a lack of competence or absence of structure. This is a normal condition of strategy and leadership inside complex systems.
The conditions that create undecidability
A few patterns tend to show up.
Competing constraints. Multiple legitimate constraints cannot all be satisfied at once. Speed versus quality. Autonomy versus consistency.
In practice: delivery leaders are forced to choose which non-functional requirement to compromise – not because priorities are unclear, but because the system demands a trade-off. The decision isn't about finding the right answer. It's about choosing which cost to accept.
Asymmetric consequences. Risks and rewards are unevenly distributed. One team bears the operational cost; another receives the strategic upside. The decision-maker absorbs reputational risk.
In practice: a platform decision that accelerates product delivery while quietly increasing fragility elsewhere. Hesitation is often a rational response to uneven exposure.
Irreversibility and delayed feedback. Decisions cannot easily be undone, or feedback arrives too late to course-correct. Organisational restructures. Technology bets. Capability investments.
In practice: a "temporary" decision that becomes permanent before its consequences are fully understood. Calls for speed often underestimate the cost of getting it wrong.
Value conflict. Some decisions are undecidable because they involve competing values, not efficiency. Care versus performance. Inclusion versus pace. Commercial pressure versus long-term trust.
In practice: leaders having to choose between protecting team wellbeing and meeting an externally visible commitment. These are moral and strategic decisions, rather than technical ones.
Why more direction often makes things worse
When undecidable work is misdiagnosed as unclear work, leaders respond with more direction. This can shift responsibility downward without support. It can increase pressure without resolving the underlying tension.
The problem isn't insufficient clarity. It's insufficient ownership of trade-offs.
A different stance
There's no framework for this. But the shift tends to look something like: From explaining to containing; from optimising to prioritising; from seeking certainty to owning consequence.
Making constraints explicit reduces friction. Agreement on priorities matters more than perfect answers. Leadership, in these situations, is often about holding tension rather than resolving it.
A closing thought
Stalled work isn’t necessarily broken. Judgement, rather than clarity, may be called for.
When leaders stop trying to explain uncertainty away, they often discover that progress was waiting on something else entirely. Ownership.
Ady Coles works with leadership teams to help strategy survive contact with reality. His focus is on strategy management and agile strategy delivery - designing the translation between intent and execution so that direction remains coherent as organisations move, grow, and adapt. He works as a fractional and advisory partner where clarity, judgement, and sustained alignment matter more than plans on paper.