Revisiting these questions can feel productive because thinking is associated with good judgement. But there is a point at which more thinking produces no new information.gettyMaking a big decision can feel like the difficult part.Leaving a job. Ending a business relationship. Restructuring a team. Moving to another country. Turning down an opportunity. Committing to a strategy that will take years rather than months to produce results.Eventually, after weeks of thinking, conversations and perhaps several sleepless nights, you decide.Then something unexpected happens.You start deciding all over again.A former colleague calls with an attractive proposition. The strategy has a difficult first month. Someone questions whether you have made a mistake. Suddenly, all the arguments you considered before making the decision return, except now they feel more urgent because something has actually been lost.We tend to assume that good decision-making means remaining open-minded. Usually it does. But there comes a point when constantly reconsidering a decision stops being thoughtful and starts becoming destructive.Some decisions need revisiting.Others need time to work.Knowing the difference may be one of the most underrated skills in leadership.Doubt After A Decision Doesn’t Mean The Decision Was WrongWe have a strange expectation that certainty should follow important decisions.It rarely does.The bigger the decision, the more likely it is that something valuable existed on both sides. If leaving a job meant escaping something terrible for something obviously better, there would have been very little to decide. Difficult decisions are difficult precisely because they involve competing benefits, risks and losses.Once the choice is made, however, attention often shifts toward what has been surrendered. The job you left suddenly seems more attractive. The strategy you rejected begins to reveal possibilities you hadn’t fully appreciated. The candidate you didn’t hire gets an impressive new position elsewhere.Research on counterfactual thinking shows how readily people imagine alternative versions of events, particularly after consequential choices. We ask what might have happened if we had chosen differently, often comparing the messy reality of the path we selected with an idealized version of the path we didn’t.That isn’t a fair comparison.Your actual decision contains delayed trains, difficult conversations and unexpected problems. The alternative exists only in your imagination, where inconvenient details are remarkably easy to remove.Sometimes it is simply evidence that the choice mattered.Decide In Advance What Would Make You ReconsiderThere is an obvious danger in telling leaders to stick with their decisions.Sometimes they shouldn’t.History is full of executives who continued with failing acquisitions, products and strategies long after the evidence suggested they should stop. Research on escalation of commitment has shown that people can become increasingly attached to decisions after investing significant time, money or reputation in them. Instead of asking whether the decision still makes sense, they begin defending it because reversing course would require acknowledging that the original choice may have been wrong.The solution isn’t constant reconsideration. It is deciding, preferably before emotions become involved, what evidence would justify changing course.Imagine committing to a new strategy for twelve months. Before implementation, identify the conditions under which you would reconsider it. Perhaps revenue falls beyond a particular level, customer retention deteriorates or an important assumption proves false.Now compare that with changing direction because three weeks have been uncomfortable.The first is evidence.The second may simply be anxiety.Strong decision-makers don’t promise never to change their minds. They establish a higher threshold for reopening decisions they have already made.Stop Asking The Same Question Every MorningSome decisions become exhausting because people never allow them to become decisions.They remain permanent debates.Should I have taken the other job? Should we have chosen the other supplier? Was restructuring the department really necessary?Revisiting these questions can feel productive because thinking is associated with good judgement. But there is a point at which more thinking produces no new information.Research into rumination suggests that repeatedly returning to unresolved thoughts can increase distress without improving problem solving. The mind feels busy while making remarkably little progress.Leaders can fall into the same trap. They revisit a decision because discomfort creates the impression that something remains unfinished.Sometimes the most useful response is surprisingly simple: close the decision.Write down why you made it. Record the evidence available at the time, the alternatives you considered and the assumptions behind your choice. Then decide when you will formally review it.Until that point, stop conducting unofficial reviews every time something goes wrong.A difficult Tuesday is not necessarily new evidence.Commitment Creates Information That Indecision Never CanThere is another reason to stick with a decision that is easy to overlook.Some choices only become good after you commit to them.A new strategy needs employees to reorganize around it. A career move requires relationships to be built. A restructuring needs new routines to settle. Constantly signalling that the decision might be reversed prevents those things from happening.Research on goal commitment suggests that people are more likely to persist, direct effort and develop strategies when they are genuinely committed to an objective. Commitment changes behavior. Once a direction is accepted, people begin solving the problems associated with making it work rather than continually evaluating whether another direction might have been easier.This doesn’t mean convincing yourself that every decision was brilliant.It means recognizing that decisions should be judged partly by the quality of the process that produced them, not solely by what happens immediately afterwards.A good decision can produce a bad outcome. A terrible decision can occasionally produce a wonderful one. Leaders who judge themselves entirely through hindsight eventually learn the wrong lessons from both.Perhaps the better question after making a major decision isn’t, “Do I still feel certain?”You probably won’t.Ask instead whether anything important has changed since you decided. Is there genuinely new information? Has a central assumption proved wrong? Has the cost become fundamentally different from what you anticipated?If the answer is yes, reconsidering may be good leadership.If the answer is no, the discomfort may simply be part of having chosen.We spend enormous amounts of time teaching leaders how to make decisions. Perhaps we should spend more teaching them what happens afterwards.Because sometimes the difficult part isn’t deciding what to do.It’s giving your decision enough time to become the right one.