The Real Threat Is “Maybe Later”

Why. Can’t. We. Get. This. Project. Across. The. Finish. Line?

I've watched it happen in a conference room more than once. After a robust, productive creative process, we’ll be down to four logo options on the wall for a rebrand (or concepts for an ad campaign or whatever, but we’re going with logos today because it happened again recently).

The key is we’re replacing an existing communication tool that has been deemed insufficient.

Within minutes, the room narrows the four options down to two. One has a clear edge. Heads are nodding, someone's already asking about rollout timelines, talking about how great it looks on shirts. Then, without anyone quite deciding to, the conversation slows. The two options start to get re-litigated. I try to steer the room back to the decision it had almost made.

But inevitably, four words end the meeting: “let's sleep on it.”

They might come back in a few days with a decision. Or they might come back deciding to keep the logo that was, to them, so bad that they hired someone to replace it.

Why'd We Stall?

Sales teams have a name for a deal that dies this way: “no decision”. Sales that aren’t lost to a competitor. The status quo just wins the day. 

In their book “The JOLT Effect,” Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna analyzed millions of recorded sales calls for their research on customer decision-making. They call this moment the “inaction paradox”. And by their research, it accounts for more lost business than any rival ever does.

The reason has a scientific name too: loss aversion. It's a well-documented aspect of how people weigh decisions. A loss looms larger in the mind than an equivalent gain.

Which means when someone is choosing between “the new thing that might be great” and “the old thing that's at least familiar,” the brain isn't running a fair comparison. It’s protecting against what it perceives as the worse of two outcomes: picking wrong.

That’s what was happening in my conference room. Nobody in that meeting believed the old logo was better. They’d hired us specifically because they didn’t like their old logo. But the new logo carried a risk the old one didn’t: the risk of being wrong, in public, on the record. And the old logo, tired as it was, came with a risk that felt smaller simply because it was familiar.

But here’s the kicker: staying with the old logo isn’t actually the safe choice. It has real costs! Continued brand erosion, a market that's already moved on, competitors who look more capable by comparison, and so on. But those costs are slow and diffuse while the cost of choosing the new logo is immediate and personal: it's your name in the email that says “we’re going with the new direction.”

The status quo isn’t risk-free. It’s just a risk no one has to sign their name to.

The High Cost of Choosing

Zoom out, and the redesign was the company’s decision. Commissioned by the company. Paid for by the company.

Zoom into the room, though, and it wasn’t “the company” sitting across from me. It was the one person who’d pitched this project to their partners months earlier. Who’d spent real credibility convincing a skeptical team that the old logo needed to go. Who would be the one person others would blame the minute someone complains (and someone always complains, of course).

That’s the dynamic we often miss in these meetings. The organization’s risk is borrowed by everyone and owned by no one. But the risk facing our client was singular, and it was staring them in the face.

And everyone needs to be aware of what’s happening in those moments. Because we’re not debating two logos or campaign ideas or video concepts or town hall agendas or whatever. Nope. We’re watching one person calculate what it would cost them, personally and professionally, to be wrong. 

Taking the Risk off the Table

The truth is “let's sleep on it” almost never means new information is coming. There's nothing left to learn about a logo by staring at it for three more days. What it usually means is that the person carrying the risk is asking for someone else to help carry the weight of the decision.

Dixon and McKenna found that the sales reps who beat the “no decision” outcome weren’t the ones who pushed harder. They were the ones who made the buyer feel less alone in the decision. Three moves showed up again and again in their research, and all three translate directly to a creative approval meeting.

• Set honest expectations. The reps who oversold results early on created buyers who quietly doubted every claim as decision time approached. But the ones who set believable, slightly conservative expectations built buyers who trusted them more, not less. In a creative context: don't promise everyone will love the new logo and that it will fix brand perception overnight. Because they won’t and it can’t (at least, not right away). Say plainly what it will do, on what timeline, and let the work outperform a modest promise instead of underperforming a grand one.

• Offer a safety net. Buyers who were given some form of downside protection like a trial period, an opt-out, or a smaller pilot signed at nearly double the rate of buyers who weren't. In a creative context: this can be a phased rollout instead of an all-at-once launch. A defined checkpoint to revisit the decision after real-world exposure. Or simply say, “If this doesn't perform the way we expect in ninety days, here's exactly what we'll do about it.” We need to make a safety net visible.

• Start smaller. The best reps talked buyers out of the biggest option, not into it, because a modest “yes” beats an ambitious “maybe”. In a creative context: put the new mark somewhere low stakes first. Internal signage like desktop wallpapers. Print off some stationery on the office printer before they have to order reems. Make a vehicle magnet that you can take off. Somewhere the client can watch it work before their name is on the version everyone sees.

None of these three moves ask the decision maker to be braver. They just ease the amount of bravery required.

What Will You Choose?

Decisions like these are hard. They carry weight. They matter and they have consequences. But the risk is almost always less than it seems. And there are ways to minimize that risk if we can get creative about it.

And never forget the reminder from Canadian prog-rock band Rush: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

The next time someone tells you they need to sleep on it, don't hear a request for more time. Hear what it actually is: a request for you to help them carry something they're currently bearing alone.