How to Decide When Data Offers No Ground

Klaus Eidenschink, in his warmly recommended book "Decisions Without Reason," formulates something that many people immediately recognize but rarely say aloud: decisions have no rational foundations. They have rational justifications. That is not the same thing.

What he means: the moment in which a decision is made is not a logical conclusion. It is a leap. The justifications come afterward. They are reconstructions, legitimizations, stories we tell ourselves and others to make the decision plausible. But they are not its cause.

This is not a critique of rationality. It is a sober description of how decisions actually work, including in intelligent, reflective, well-informed people.

The problem with data

Whoever decides a lot knows the phenomenon: you have all the relevant numbers, market data, scenarios. You've consulted advisors, run workshops, filled out decision matrices. And then you still sit there not knowing what is right. That's not for lack of data. It's because data alone is never sufficient to compel a decision. Between the data and the decision there always lies a gap. This gap is not an information problem. It is an existential problem. Someone has to leap. And the leaping cannot be delegated.

Eidenschink shows that many decision-making processes in organizations fail for precisely this reason: more and more data is produced, more and more analysis, more and more consultation, in the hope that eventually enough information will be present to make the decision unavoidable. But that moment never comes. Because it doesn't exist.

What then?

When data provides no sufficient ground, other sources of information are needed. Not irrational ones. But non-trivial ones. By non-trivial I mean: information that doesn't come from the usual chain of analysis. That isn't in the next report. That can't be obtained through more research. Information that comes from other channels of perception than the analytical mind.

Concretely these can be:

Bodily signals. What happens in my body when I think about Option A? And when I think about Option B? Not as an oracle, but as a source of information. The body has often already decided before the mind knows. It processes patterns that can't be translated into language.

There is an example of this that nearly everyone knows: you flip a coin. Heads means Option A, tails means Option B. The coin lands. You lift your hand. And in exactly that moment, before you've rationally categorized anything, you feel quite clearly: I'm not okay with this result at all. Not slightly dissatisfied, but genuinely, palpably not okay with it. That's not coincidence. That is the body signaling a preference that was not consciously accessible before. The coin didn't create it. It made it visible.

Dreams and images: not in the esoteric sense, but in the neurophysiological. During sleep, in the hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping, the brain continues working on unsolved problems without the filter logic of waking consciousness. Many important insights come from these states.

Systemic resonance: what do I feel when sitting 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 can't be captured in numbers.

Altered states of consciousness: rhythmic drumming, meditation, intensive physical movement — all of these practices shift the weighting in the brain. Analytical filtering steps back. Other perceptual channels become accessible. What surfaces there is not imagination. It is information from regions that are drowned out in everyday consciousness.

Another way: effective criteria

There is another answer to the problem of the data-less decision that is less well known but extremely effective in practice: working with explicit criteria. Effective criteria are not checklists and not scoring matrices. They are precisely formulated statements about what a decision must fulfill in order to align with one's own values, goals, and direction.

When these criteria are clear and arranged in a meaningful hierarchy, many decisions that previously required laborious weighing of options resolve themselves almost automatically. The switch is already set. One only has to read it.

This applies not just to individual decisions. In organizations, where decisions across different areas depend on each other and mutually slow each other down, clarity about criteria can change entire decision architectures. What previously took weeks because no one knew which standard to decide by suddenly becomes routine.

The foundation for this work I developed through engagement with the works of Marianne and Herbert Brün, and with the concept of Desire Statements from the context of the School for Designing a Society. Developed there in an artistic-activist framework, I translate these tools into organizational and life design. In my workshop series "The Architecture of Intent" I work with exactly this: how criteria can be captured, hierarchized, and composed such that they become genuinely effective, rather than merely existing on paper. For now, only this much: whoever has well-defined criteria no longer needs to experience many decisions as a choice between different options. They are then no longer decisions. They are consequences.

Eidenschink's rebound

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 one actually consults when deciding. Most decision processes in organizations maximize a single source: rational analysis. That is not wrong. But it is one-sided. And it overlooks what Eidenschink states clearly: in the end, someone leaps. And this leap doesn't come from the data. It comes from the person who decides.

If that is so, then it makes sense to also take the person seriously as a source of insight. Not just their analyses. Also their body. Their images. Their dreams. Their resonance with what surrounds them. And the criteria by which they actually live, not just the ones they mention in meetings.

Surprisingly many people orient themselves in their private decisions toward non-trivial information, horoscopes, coffee grounds, tarot cards, or the I Ching. All are excellent systems that function similarly to the coin flip. For whoever has access to them, they make the intuitive more experienceable. In principle, it doesn't really matter on what basis a right decision is made. Eidenschink would perhaps say: you leap anyway. The question is only from which ground.