This question turns up for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it's a bit of unease. Sometimes it's a sense of responsibility, or the sheer size of the decision. Sometimes it's a gut feel with nothing behind it you can point to. And sometimes there's no visible reason at all - just the fact that the decision matters enough that rushing it feels wrong.
Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is useful here. The idea running through it is that fast judgment can sometimes pick up on something before you can explain what it has picked up on. But the same book is honest about the other side: fast judgment can also be plain wrong. It gets distorted by bias, pressure, the way something is framed, by confidence, by fear, by whatever context you happen to be in.
So the gut feel is not an answer. It's a signal - worth listening to, not worth obeying.
That framing avoids two mistakes at once. One is treating the doubt as automatically meaningful, as if the unease proves there's a problem. The other is brushing it aside because it hasn't formed into anything clear yet. Either way, the question doesn't decide it for you - it only tells you the decision needs another look.
And here's the harder part.
"What am I missing?" doesn't come with a location attached. The missing thing could hide in an assumption, a consequence, a constraint, the timing, the capacity to deliver, who actually owns it, the weight of expectation sitting on it, or the way the whole decision has been framed. The question points at everything and nothing.
It gets harder still if you've been inside the decision for a while. You may have built the logic yourself. You may have defended it to other people. You've got used to its shape, and you're looking at it through the same frame that made it feel sensible in the first place. So even on a good day, when you think you know exactly what you want to check, it's worth being mindful that you may be biased, or simply not seeing something that someone outside it would catch in a moment.
Which points to what actually helps: change the angle of the check. That might mean stepping back and looking at the decision fresh yourself. It might mean handing it to someone else to look at, testing the assumptions directly, looking hard at who will carry the consequences, checking what the decision quietly depends on, looking around the decision rather than only at the main argument for it - and on, and on. The list doesn't really end, which is rather the point.
(By the way, this is what the Second Look Decision Diagnostic does: a structured scan for what may be missing before the decision gets treated as settled.)
The point is not "trust your gut." It's not "ignore your gut" either. It's check it.
If this feels familiar, start here:
👉 Run the Second Look Decision Diagnostic to check your decision
👉Read about checking business decisions
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