Parliament: Decide, Don’t Slide
Last night at The Common Wealth kickoff, I heard about the work of Scott Stanley, a researcher who has spent decades studying why relationships fall apart. His finding surprised me. The biggest risk to a relationship isn't conflict or incompatibility. It's letting important decisions happen instead of making them.
Couples slide into living together, slide into engagement, slide into entire lives they never actually chose. The ones who make it are the ones who decided on purpose. Stanley compresses all of that research into threewords: decide, don't slide.
I wrote it down immediately, because I have watched the same thing happen inside organizations. Including mine.
Nobody slides on purpose. That's what makes it sliding. No company wakes up one morning and chooses to be unclear about its positioning. It just keeps saying yes to work that's adjacent to the work it should be doing, keeps a reporting structure because that's how it grew, keeps a service on the menu because someone once bought it. Five years later the strategy is an archaeology of accumulated yeses.
Leadership will tell you they're the captain of the ship, and they believe it. But look at the wake and you can see the current was steering.
Here's what makes this more urgent than it was even two years ago. AI has made it possible to solve the wrong problem the right way at a speed we've never seen. Claude will build the deck, write the plan, and draft the campaign beautifully, in an afternoon, without ever once asking whether this was the direction worth going.
Your team is faster now. If they're pointed at something you slid into rather than something you decided, they will get to the wrong place with impressive efficiency. Speed rewards clarity and punishes drift.
This is the work of The Brand Being Method™. It's a decision, made deliberately, about who you are, so you stop sliding into whoever you're becoming by default. But brand isn't the only decision an organization owes itself. I push every leader I work with toward a yearly strategy that gets chosen the same way, out loud and on purpose. And then the step almost everyone skips: wrapping that decision up so employees can actually carry it.
A strategy that lives in the founder's head isn't a decision. It's a mood.
A recent example from inside Hoot. We had one person "in charge of sales." That structure wasn't chosen. It accumulated, the way these things do. Then I attended the Acquisition Lab workshop in Vegas and realized that internal sales and external sales are wildly different jobs. Growing existing client relationships and winning brand-new ones require different strategies, different instincts, different rhythms. So we split them. We defined what "sales" means for each role and set KPIs to match. It has been a game changer, and not because anyone worked harder. The clarity did the work. Two people now know exactly what game they're playing and how the score gets kept.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Deciding isn't just a leadership discipline, it's a gift you give your team.
Ambiguity feels flexible from the top. From inside a role, it feels like guessing. You only feel carsick in the passenger seat.
Every decision you don't make on purpose becomes a decision your people are forced to improvise, daily, in a hundred small ways you'll never see.
Stanley was talking about marriage. But an organization is a set of relationships too, between leaders and teams, between a company and its own future. The research holds. The ones that last are the ones that were chosen.
Decide, don't slide.
