The Lag Effect of Decisions

Too often the consequences of our choices arrive long after we make them

I have always had a love-hate relationship with decisions. Not making them; I always do even if it does take me longer than necessary many times. I am a member of good standing, of the last-minute society. What I especially hate about decisions is when I have more than one option to choose from, and the spaces between them are grey and blurry. It is so much easier when the only choice available is between X and X. Even better if the potential pain of not choosing either X or X is clear and imminent.

We weigh decisions every day. We wrestle with them. Sometimes we move forward with confidence. Other times with doubt we cannot quite shake.

What we don’t often have, in any of those moments, is a clear view of what comes next. Because the only thing that reveals whether a decision was right or wrong is time.

Many times, decisions do not reveal their outcomes as early as they should. Or at least as early as we’d like. They unfold over time. Sometimes slowly, and so much later we might not even connect the dots between decision and consequence. The cause and effect you could say. I have come to think of this as the lag effect of decisions.

I do not remember the exact words.

But I will never forget the moment. A short conversation. A letter handed over. The soft thud of a heavy door closing behind me.

I sat at my desk for another hour, trying to be productive, but really just waiting for the clock to get to time. Trying in my subconscious, to downplay the enormity of what I had just done. When it was time, I walked out, got into my car, rolled out of the big parking lot, turned the music up, and started driving.

Somewhere along the way, I began to laugh. Out loud. Alone in the car. Then I called my wife and told her I had quit my job. A glamorous, well-paid job with a global blue-chip company. She did not approve or disapprove. She simply received the news.

At the time, it felt logical and rational. Not only justified but the only reasonable option available to me.

What I did not understand then is something I have come to learn much later.

Decisions have a lag. A lag between action and result. Between the haze of now, and the twenty/twenty clarity of hindsight. Between the moment we decide and the moment we truly see what that decision has done.

We tend to think of decisions as singular events. A point in time. A moment of clarity. Followed by immediate and visible results.

But often they are not. They are beginnings.

They set things in motion, sometimes dramatically, many times invisibly, and then unfold over time, revealing themselves in ways we could not have fully anticipated.

Careers shift. Relationships bend or break. Opportunities appear or disappear. Paths close. Others open. And yet, in the moment of decision, none of this is fully visible.

All we have is conviction. Even when it’s just a hunch, there is always some conviction in the moment. And conviction, I have come to see, can be a kind of false clarity.

Looking back, I can trace many of the defining moments of my life to decisions that felt clear cut at the time. Not easy, but clear cut.

Leaving jobs. Taking others. Walking away from situations that no longer felt right. Leaning into ones that did. In each case, believing I was acting with clarity and commensurate conviction.

And perhaps I was. But clarity, as I came to realise, is not the same as foresight.

Take this long-time friend of mine who has quite the comeback story. He was a flying ad exec with his own firm and starting to knock on the big-league door. Unfortunately, he had gotten divorced in a messy affair, about two years before the COVID-19 curse sucker punched the world. In the divorce he had lost the house, gamely walked away and set himself up in a beautiful high-end apartment that didn’t come cheap. But then Covid obliterated his business literally overnight and he found himself with a really hard decision to make: dig his heels in and fight the losing battle of trying to live within his significantly diminished means; or cut his losses, salvage what he could, and move away from the city he had called home all his life. He chose to relocate to a different part of the country where he could go back to basics, make sense of things and press reset on his life. Five years later, he quite simply looks like a genius. He’s not only gotten back on his feet, but has also redefined himself in the corporate communications space. He is steadily building a credible, if not yet powerful personal brand that he is successfully monetising. Time has vindicated his decision.

The question I find myself returning to is a simple one.

If I could go back, knowing what I know now, would I make a different decision?

Often, the answer surprises me.

No.

I would probably do the same thing.

Because those decisions, for all their imperfections, also shaped the life I have lived, and the person I have become. They were who I was, what I knew, and the perspective I had in that moment. What I would perhaps change, though, is the how.

Take my resignation, for example. Looking back, I can see where a little more patience, a little more time, might have led to a different outcome. I was not in an untenable position. No one was forcing me out. I could have waited. And in waiting, perhaps allowed something better to emerge. Or for the situation to resolve itself, as it so often does, gently reprimanding us for not seeing that doing nothing can sometimes be the best way. But I did not. And that, I have come to understand, is part of the lag. We do not just live with the decisions we make. We live with the how of how we make them.

Looking back, I also see something else more clearly than I did then.

Much of my career was shaped by instinct and the voice in my young head, often without the benefit of experienced, or just alternative counsel. There were voices around me, including my wife at the time, but too often, they were drowned out by the one-dimensional voice in my head.

If I could change one thing, it would not be the decisions themselves. It would be to have had more perspective. Especially from people who had gone ahead of me. People who could have helped me see around corners I did not even know existed.

There is also another realisation that has taken longer to awaken to. I was present in my family and my children’s lives. But I was not always available. Work, ambition, and in some seasons, distraction, took precedence when they shouldn’t have. Not absent. But not fully there either.

That too is part of the lag. We do not notice it when it is happening. We only feel it later, in empty spaces left by the inexorable tide of time turning.

The lag effect is perhaps most unforgiving in relationships.

An extra-marital affair whose consequences we might barely contemplate. The marriage survives the immediate crisis. We carry on. Life, on the surface, returns to normal.

But years later, the marriage ends, and in the aftermath of the divorce, we might see the shadow of our former lover from a decade ago, looming darkly over the drama now playing out. And in that moment, things become clear to us in a way they never have before.

Some decisions do not end when we think they do.

They linger. They fester. They embed themselves irreversibly into the fabric of our lives. And their consequences, though delayed, are not erased. They simply arrive later.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is this. Decisions deserve more time and contemplation than the moment demands. Not endless hesitation, but deeper thought. Not paralysis by analysis, but more circumspection. More perspective.

Because the true weight of a decision is seldom felt at the time and place of making it. It is felt later, in the life that unfolds because of it.

And by then, the decision is no longer a choice.

It is a story.