Are you basing critical decisions on facts — or opinions dressed up as facts — and does your team know the difference?
| I’ve heard it said that the average adult makes 35,000 decisions every day. I’m a bit sceptical of very round numbers like that — round numbers in research always make me raise an eyebrow. But the point behind it? Absolutely true. We’re making decisions constantly, often without even noticing. And the single biggest trap I see — in boardrooms, in strategy sessions, in everyday professional life — is treating opinions as facts. The Problem With Invisible Assumptions “The market is moving in this direction.” Fact or opinion? “Our team isn’t ready for this change.” Fact or opinion? “This approach won’t work for our clients.” Fact or opinion? In most meetings, statements like these get delivered with the confidence of facts and the substance of opinions. And when nobody challenges the distinction, the decision that follows gets built on a foundation of assumption rather than evidence. That’s a fragile foundation for anything important. The challenge is that opinions don’t announce themselves. They arrive dressed up in the same authoritative language as facts, spoken with the same conviction, often by the same people. A senior person saying “our clients won’t go for this” sounds like market intelligence. It may just be a hunch. The One Question That Changes Everything One of the most valuable habits any leader, chair, or team member can develop is to ask — calmly, consistently, without aggression — “Is that a fact or an opinion?” You don’t need to sound like a prosecutor. You can frame it as genuine curiosity: “Is that something we know, or something we believe?” The difference in the response will tell you almost everything about the quality of your information. Delivered well, this question doesn’t shut the conversation down — it opens it up. It invites the person to think more carefully about the basis for what they’ve said, and it signals to everyone else in the room that evidence matters here. What Good Decision-Making Actually Looks Like The best decision-makers I’ve worked with — and I’ve worked with many, from CEOs to community chairs — share a common habit: they separate the evidence from the interpretation before they act on either. They’re not dismissive of opinion. Experienced judgment is valuable. But they want to know which is which. When they hear a strong assertion, they’ll ask: what do we actually know here? What are we assuming? What would we need to find out before we’re confident? This doesn’t slow decisions down — it actually speeds them up. Because decisions built on clearly identified evidence tend to stick. They don’t need to be revisited when someone suddenly points out that the “fact” everyone agreed on was actually just the most senior person’s view. The Discipline Worth Developing Protecting the integrity of your information is a discipline. Like most disciplines, it requires conscious effort at first, and then it becomes habit. Start in your next meeting. When a strong statement is made, ask yourself: is that based on data we have, or a belief we hold? You don’t have to challenge every assertion out loud — but developing the internal habit of sorting fact from opinion will change how you listen, how you question, and how you decide. Decisions are only as good as the information they’re built on. And information is only as good as your willingness to examine it clearly. That’s not scepticism. That’s leadership. |
