Choosing is not deciding

Karen shares her reflections from PARC's June 2026 session on decision-making in volatile times

In June we brought together two thinkers to interrogate how we make decisions when, as Joe Bikart put it, the map keeps changing. Joe, of Templar Advisors, took us through the psychology of deciding under pressure. Dr Umar Taj, of Warwick and LSE, took us through the discipline of it. Between them they left me with a number of reflections I have come back to, and certainly one I think every reward leader should consider.

Most of what we call "decision-making" is actually choosing. And the two are not the same.

Taj offered a deceptively simple definition: a decision is an irrevocable allocation of resources, and it only becomes a decision once you know what you are choosing between,  once someone has done the work of creating the options. Choosing is picking from a list. Deciding is framing the problem, surfacing the real alternatives, and taking ownership for the consequences. By the time a recommendation and two safe alternatives land in front of a committee, most of the deciding has already happened. The room “just” has to choose.

This should give reward professionals pause for thought. You and your team are very often the people who build the list of options.

Think about how creating the RemCo paper works. You frame the issues. You set out the options. You make the recommendations. The committee deliberates and selects. You tell yourselves you advised and they decided. Look at it a different way. The architecture of the decision, the assumptions built into it, the alternatives you chose to include or leave out, were yours. As Joe put it, advice is useful, but accountability cannot be delegated. And the reverse is just as true: influence cannot be disowned. If we shape the options, we are part of the decision, whatever "governance" states.

The second idea that stuck with me was Taj's insistence that we judge decisions by the wrong thing. We judge them by outcomes. The share price rose, so the pay decision was sound. Retention of key talent held, so the package was right. But a good outcome can follow a poor process, and a sound process can be derailed by bad luck. Outcome bias lets us off the hook for how we actually decided i.e. the process we took to come to a decision.

This is where heightened scrutiny changes the stakes for decision making. Reward decisions are increasingly exposed -  to regulators, to proxy advisers, to employees who can now see far more than they once could, and to a press that scrutinises pay through a "moral" lens. When a decision is interrogated from the outside, "well, it worked" is not an adequate answer. The only thing that holds up is the quality of the process: who was consulted, what was challenged, which biases were checked, and which alternatives were genuinely weighed up and considered. In a world of pay transparency and tighter governance, a defensible process is not a nicety. It is now an asset, and one that you need to articulate clearly.

Both speakers were blunt about how easily we fool ourselves. Confirmation bias towards last year's (successful enough) approach. Anchoring on the first number shared in a meeting. The illusion of control. The quiet deference to whoever holds the most status or command at the table. This is what Joe, drawing on group psychology, described as our tendency to idealise the "knowing" leader rather than do the harder work ourselves. None of this is solved by being clever or experienced. Taj was blunt: you do not become an expert decision-maker simply by being the one who decides a great many times.

Beneath all of these sits a deeper trap, and Joe called it out: identity. The hardest decisions are the ones that threaten how we see ourselves, and the more senior we are, the more we have invested in being the person who knows. That is where ego can do its damage. We hold on to being the decision-maker because deciding has become a marker of position, a proof of authority rather than a duty to be discharged well. We treat challenge as threat and dissent as disloyalty, and we close down precisely the voices that would have improved the decision.

Hubris leaves its mark, and Joe showed it on a single chart: as our confidence grows, it outpaces our accuracy. Experience makes us feel more certain long after it has stopped making us more right. The reward leader who has "seen it all before" is, on that evidence, the one most worth interrupting. The research Joe drew on put it sharply -  the brake holding the best leaders back is usually their own psychological conditioning, the very habits and instincts that got them to the top.

The corrective to ego and hubris is not false modesty. It is humility of process: the discipline to assume you might be wrong, to invite the contrary view, and to build a way of deciding that does not rest on any one person being right. Ego asks, "whose call is this?" Humility asks, "how do we make sure this call is a good one?" The second question is the one that can survive scrutiny.

That is what designing better decision making looks like in practice. Both speakers ended in a similar place: look to the process. Be a decision architect. Build challenge into the room. Separate the people who recommend from the people who decide. Make the assumptions explicit so they can be argued with. Agree what evidence would be enough before you start gathering it. None of this is glamorous but it can be learned and implemented.

Here is the provocation I would leave with reward leaders and their teams. Look at the last significant decision your RemCo, or equivalent, made. Was it a decision, or was it a choice? Who created the options, and who merely selected from them? And if that process were laid open tomorrow to a regulator, a journalist, or your own workforce - would it be the outcome you would want to stand behind, or simply one you got to and somehow accepted? 

This is a question that will increasingly matter, not least in the context of increasing transparency and stakeholder scrutiny.

If this article resonates with you, our Influence, Decision-Making and Stakeholder Engagement Masterclass this September explores these themes in much greater depth. Through practical scenarios, peer discussion and expert-led sessions, the programme is designed to help reward and HR leaders strengthen their judgement, influence and communication in the moments that matter most.