In his book Decisions Without Reason, Klaus Eidenschink articulates something many people recognise immediately but rarely say aloud: decisions have no rational foundations. They have rational justifications. That is not the same thing.
What he means is this: the moment a decision is made is not a logical conclusion. It is a leap. The reasons come afterwards. They are reconstructions, legitimations, stories we tell ourselves and others to make the decision plausible. But they are not its cause.
This is not a criticism of rationality. It is a sober description of how decisions actually work, including for intelligent, reflective and well-informed people.
The problem with data
Anyone who makes a great many decisions knows the experience: you have all the relevant figures, market data and scenarios. You have consulted advisers, held workshops and completed decision matrices. And still you sit there without knowing what is right.
That is not a lack of data. It is that data alone can never compel a decision. There is always a gap between the data and the decision. This gap is not an information problem. It is an existential one. Someone has to leap. And the leap cannot be delegated.
Eidenschink shows that many decision-making processes in organisations fail at precisely this point. More data, more analysis and more consultation are produced in the hope that eventually enough information will exist to make the decision unavoidable. But that moment never arrives, because it does not exist.
What then?
When data offers no sufficient ground, other sources of information are needed. Not irrational sources, but non-trivial ones.
Bodily signals: what happens in my body when I consider Option A? What happens with Option B? Not as an oracle, but as a source of information. The body has often already registered a preference before the mind knows it. It processes patterns that cannot readily be translated into language.
There is an example almost everyone knows. You toss a coin. Heads means Option A, tails means Option B. The coin lands. You lift your hand. And in that exact moment you feel it clearly: I am not at all at ease with this result. That is not coincidence. It is the body signalling a preference that was not consciously available before.
Systemic resonance: what do I sense when I sit in a room with a team that prefers a particular direction? What changes in my perception when an option is spoken aloud? These are genuine pieces of information, even if they cannot be expressed in numbers.
Altered states of consciousness: rhythmic drumming, meditation and intensive physical movement all shift the weighting of attention in the brain. Analytical filtering recedes. Other channels of perception become accessible. What arises is not mere invention. It is information from areas that are usually drowned out in everyday consciousness.
Another way: criteria that do real work
There is another response to decisions that cannot be resolved by data. It is less well known, but exceptionally effective in practice: working with explicit criteria.
Effective criteria are neither checklists nor scoring matrices. They are precise statements about what a decision must fulfil if it is to align with your values, aims and direction. Once these criteria are clear and placed in a meaningful hierarchy, many decisions that once demanded laborious weighing begin to resolve themselves.
I developed the basis for this work through sustained engagement with Marianne and Herbert Brün, and with the concept of Desire Statements from the School for Designing a Society. My workshop series The Architecture of Intention is concerned with exactly this: how criteria can be articulated, ordered and composed so that they become genuinely effective rather than merely existing on paper.
The question that returns to us
Eidenschink’s diagnosis is razor-sharp: decisions have no reasons that compel them. What follows from that? Not arbitrariness, but the question of which sources we actually consult when we decide.
Most decision processes in organisations maximise a single source: rational analysis. That is not wrong. But it is one-sided. In the end, someone leaps. And that leap does not come from the data. It comes from the person who decides.
A surprising number of people orient themselves in private decisions through non-trivial information: a horoscope, coffee grounds, tarot cards or the I Ching. All are systems that work in a way similar to the coin toss. They make intuition easier to experience.
Eidenschink might say: you will leap anyway. The only question is the ground from which you leap.