Dear Leaders,

Last weekend I read Waiting for Godot (pronounced “good-o”) for the first time.

It’s a short play, 109 pages, that Samuel Beckett wrote in 1953. A story of two men, Vladimir and Estragon, sitting by a barren tree waiting for a man named Godot to arrive.

Every day, a messenger comes to tell them Godot won’t make it today, but surely tomorrow. They know he probably isn’t coming. They talk endlessly about leaving. They never leave.

The play is widely read as an exploration of the human condition: the tension between hope and futility, meaning and absurdity. Vladimir and Estragon cannot leave (they try) and cannot stop waiting. They are suspended between the discomfort of staying and the terror of going.

At one point, Estragon says, “I can’t go on like this.” Vladimir replies, “That’s what you think.”

Beckett famously refused to say. The most common interpretation is God – Godot, God – but the ambiguity is deliberate. Godot is whatever you have made your life conditional upon: a person, a breakthrough, a rescue, a moment when things will finally be clear enough to act.

In leadership, Godot is the decision you keep deferring. The moment when you imagine the ambiguity will vanish and the risk will disappear. In other words: the moment that never comes.

Strip leadership down to its bones and we are left with one thing: making decisions. Decisions are the job. Owning them is the one irreducible act of leadership. Everything else is context.

Here’s what we usually tell ourselves when we’re not deciding: I need more information. I’m waiting for the right moment. I want to bring the team along. I don’t want to move prematurely.

Sometimes that’s legitimate, for a window. There are decisions where a finite pause is prudent: when a key variable is days from becoming clear, when the cost of reversing a premature call exceeds the cost of waiting, when we’re actively buying alignment that will materially improve execution.

But most of the time, we are not in that window. We passed through it weeks or months – sometimes, years – ago.

The information we’re waiting for is not coming. The consensus we’re building is process as theatre, deferring accountability. The “right moment” is a fiction, a moving target designed, whether consciously or not, to stay just out of reach.

At some point – and we know exactly when that is, even if we won’t name it –  the waiting is no longer about the decision. It’s about us: the person who has to make the decision.

A good decision is a function of process, not result. We identify the right question. We gather the information reasonably available to us. We pressure-test the key assumptions and weigh the tradeoffs with clear eyes. And then we decide.

If we do those things, we have made a good decision, regardless of what happens next. Markets turn. People surprise us. Variables emerge that we could not have known. None of that retroactively corrupts the quality of our process.

The inverse is equally true: a decision that turns out fine can still have been reckless: made impulsively, without the relevant facts, by someone who simply got lucky.

The quality of our decision process determines whether we made a good decision; the outcome is only loosely linked. Too much is out of our control. Call the rest uncertainty, or call it luck. Either way, it’s not a useful lever.

This matters enormously because conflating decisions with outcomes is precisely what paralyzes us. Deep down, we know outcomes are uncertain. We know we might be wrong. And so we wait, hoping for a certainty that the nature of decisions makes structurally impossible.

Moral: once you have run the process – gather, assess, pressure-test, weigh – you go. You’re not certain; you never will be,  but you are ready.

The particular cruelty of indecision is that it rarely looks like cowardice in the moment. It looks like thoroughness. It looks like care. The indecisive leader can always produce a reason: another scenario to model, another quarter to observe, another stakeholder to consult. The language of caution is indistinguishable, from the outside, from the language of wisdom.

Until you look at the pattern. Then it becomes very clear.

Vladimir and Estragon are not stupid men. They are not weak men. They talk, they reason, they feel the absurdity of their situation with complete clarity. They know Godot is probably not coming. They discuss leaving constantly.

They never leave.

The tree doesn’t hold them. Fear does. The known discomfort of waiting is preferable to the unknown consequences of moving. Staying is not a decision they make consciously; it’s a decision they avoid making, which is how it gets made for them, every single day, in perpetuity.

That is not a character flaw Beckett invented. It’s a condition he diagnosed.

In my experience, leaders who cannot decide are not waiting for better information. They are waiting for someone to make it safe: for certainty that will never come, for consensus that will absolve them, for a Godot who is, by design, never going to arrive.

Decide is a word with a violent etymology. It comes from the Latin decidere: to cut off. A decision, at its root, is an act of severance. You cut off the alternatives. You cut off the waiting. You step off the branch.

That is what leadership actually asks of you. Not to be right. Not to be certain. To cut.

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.” – Vladimir, Waiting for Godot

Onward,

Hamza