More Is Not Better
Better decisions don’t always require more information. They require knowing when you’ve learned enough to act and when the next step can help you learn more.
You’ve been thinking about a decision for days, perhaps weeks. You’ve researched your options, considered the consequences, and talked to people whose judgment you trust. You believe you have enough information to make a reasonable decision, but there’s still something you don’t know.
So you keep researching. You ask another person for their opinion or revisit an option you’d already ruled out. Eventually, you’re spending more time thinking about the decision than you expected, without feeling any closer to making it.
For business owners and leaders, the stakes can make this particularly difficult. Your decisions affect other people and may have significant financial consequences. You want to be thoughtful, and gathering more information can feel like the responsible thing to do.
Sometimes it is. But there’s a point at which we need to ask whether additional information is improving our judgment or simply giving us more to think about.
When more information doesn’t help
A 2026 study published in Strategy Science examined how time pressure and artificial intelligence affected the way people thought about strategic problems.
Researchers Tim Kanis, Justus Emanuel Mann, and Jutta Stumpf-Wollersheim distinguished between two aspects of how people represent a problem: breadth, or how many different categories of information they consider, and depth, or how much detail they include within each category.
In an experiment involving 348 participants completing a startup evaluation task, time pressure narrowed the range of categories participants considered without significantly changing the level of detail within those categories. Using AI had a different effect. Participants considered a broader range of categories but included less detail within each one.
Neither condition produced a statistically significant difference in the researchers’ measure of strategic foresight.
The study doesn’t establish that breadth or depth is unimportant, and its findings concern a particular task under experimental conditions. What it illustrates is that changes in the amount and detail of information people consider don’t necessarily translate into measurable improvements in anticipating strategic outcomes.
This challenges a familiar assumption about decision-making: that more extensive analysis will produce better judgment.
But what if the information we already have is sufficient?
How much do you need to know?
Our brains have limited capacity for attention and working memory. We cannot hold every possibility in mind or anticipate every consequence of a decision. Instead, we use experience and prior knowledge to determine what deserves our attention, allowing us to make sense of complicated situations without investigating everything from the beginning.
An experienced business owner may recognize a familiar problem quickly and know which information is likely to matter. That experience makes decision-making more efficient, but it can also lead them to overlook something important when the current situation differs from what they’ve encountered before.
Good judgment therefore requires the ability to question our understanding without becoming trapped in an endless search for certainty.
This problem has a long history in decision science.
Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality challenged the assumption that people make decisions by evaluating every possible alternative to identify the optimal choice. Recognizing the limits of human knowledge and cognitive capacity, Simon proposed that we often search for an option that meets an acceptable standard rather than continuing indefinitely in pursuit of the best possible one. He called this satisficing.
The idea offers a useful foundation for thinking about sufficiency. The question isn’t always whether we’ve identified the best possible option, but whether we have enough relevant understanding to choose responsibly, given what’s at stake.
Consider replacing your appointment-scheduling software. You’ve compared the available options and identified a system that meets your requirements at a reasonable cost. You could continue researching because there may be a slightly better product available. But if the remaining differences are unlikely to affect your decision, further investigation may have little value.
Now imagine entering a business partnership involving substantial financial commitments and shared legal responsibilities. Unanswered questions about ownership or what happens if the relationship ends could have serious consequences. Here, additional investigation may be essential.
The difference lies in what is at stake and how difficult it would be to change course. Sufficiency isn’t a fixed amount of information. It’s a judgment about whether you understand enough to take a responsible next step.
Why knowing enough doesn’t always make deciding easier
Even when we have enough information to make a reasonable decision, we may still struggle to act.
Sometimes the difficulty is cognitive. We may have trouble comparing options or deciding which information deserves the most weight. Sometimes we genuinely need more time to work through something complicated.
Our emotional response can also influence the process.
Making a decision means accepting uncertainty. We can investigate carefully and choose thoughtfully, yet still discover that something didn’t work out as expected. When we’re responsible for the consequences, that possibility can be uncomfortable.
Continuing to research may help us feel productive while postponing the commitment. We hope that another piece of information will finally give us the confidence to act. Sometimes it does. Other times, we return to the same questions without learning anything that changes our understanding.
We can mistake the discomfort of uncertainty for evidence that we don’t know enough.
The opposite can happen, too. When we’re tired of thinking about a problem, we may rush toward a decision simply to escape the discomfort of having to make it. Neither response necessarily reflects what the decision requires.
Emotional regulation helps us recognize our reactions without automatically allowing them to determine what we do. Self-monitoring helps us notice whether our thinking is producing useful understanding or repeatedly covering the same ground.
A question worth asking is: What information am I missing that could realistically change my decision?
If you can identify something consequential, further investigation may be worthwhile. If you cannot, it may help to examine what you’re hoping another round of analysis will accomplish.
The distinction is between needing more information and needing to become more comfortable acting without certainty.
Sometimes the next step teaches you what you need to know
One reason we can become stuck in analysis is that we approach a decision as though we must get it right the first time.
Some decisions have consequences that are difficult to reverse and deserve considerable caution. But many leadership decisions allow us to make a manageable change and learn from what happens.
Suppose you’re a business owner who spends too much of your week responding to questions your managers could handle themselves. You suspect that unclear decision-making responsibilities are part of the problem.
You could spend weeks investigating every interruption and developing a comprehensive delegation plan. Or you might begin by clarifying which decisions one manager can make independently and observing how the arrangement works.
Perhaps interruptions decrease. Perhaps your manager still comes to you because they lack information needed to make those decisions. Or perhaps you discover that you’re having difficulty allowing decisions to happen without your involvement.
Each outcome offers a different understanding of the original problem. The change may improve the situation, but it can also reveal information that wasn’t apparent while you were thinking about it.
This is the value of incremental improvement. When the risks are manageable, a considered step can help us learn while making progress. We still need to evaluate what happens carefully rather than assuming every change in results was caused by our intervention.
But we don’t always need a complete understanding before we begin. Sometimes acting on what we reasonably know allows us to develop that understanding through experience.
Good judgment includes knowing when to reconsider
Being willing to revise a decision doesn’t mean questioning it every time something becomes difficult. Many worthwhile decisions require persistence, and an unexpected obstacle isn’t necessarily evidence that the original choice was wrong.
At the same time, continuing with a decision simply because we’ve already committed to it can prevent us from responding to information that deserves our attention.
Cognitive flexibility helps us reconsider our understanding when circumstances change. Self-monitoring helps us evaluate whether the results we’re seeing are consistent with what we expected. These abilities contribute to our capacity to adjust without abandoning a reasonable decision at the first sign of difficulty.
If a change isn’t producing the results we expected, we need to consider whether it requires more time or whether we’ve learned something that challenges our original assumptions.
Strategic thinking continues as we evaluate what happens and determine whether our understanding remains adequate. Sufficiency helps us decide when we know enough to act, while incremental improvement allows us to keep learning when the situation permits.
Better is better
We often assume that thoughtful decision-making requires us to consider every possibility and anticipate every consequence. But our cognitive resources are limited, uncertainty is unavoidable, and additional analysis has costs of its own.
Sometimes we need to investigate further because the consequences of getting something wrong are substantial. Sometimes the information we already have is sufficient. And sometimes the next useful piece of information will come from taking a reasonable step and paying attention to what happens.
The challenge is learning to distinguish among those situations.
You can make a thoughtful decision without knowing everything. You can also make a reasonable decision that needs adjusting when you learn something new.
The goal isn’t to think as much as possible before acting. It’s to think well enough to act responsibly, remain willing to learn, and improve your decisions as your understanding develops.
More is not better. Better is better.
References
Kanis, T., Mann, J. E., & Stumpf-Wollersheim, J. (2026). AI-augmented strategic decision-making under time constraints: An experimental study on mental representations and strategic foresight. Strategy Science, 11(1), 75–92.
Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 69(1), 99–118.
Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review, 63(2), 129–138.
