The Power of a Third Choice

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

I prefer a slightly different version, one I've used with clients for years: "When faced with on of only two options - take the third."

It turns out there's real research behind why that matters more than it sounds.

Paul Nutt, a professor at Ohio State, spent decades tracking how organisations actually make strategic decisions - not how they say they make them, how they really do. What he found should make every boardroom uncomfortable.

Most decisions get framed as a “whether or not” question. Should we buy this company, or not. Should we launch this, or not. A straight binary, most often against the status quo. In his research, fewer than three in ten decision-makers ever considered more than one real alternative.

The outcomes split sharply along that line. Binary decisions - one option weighed against doing nothing - failed more than half the time. Decisions that introduced a genuine third path succeeded roughly two-thirds of the time.

That's not a small difference. That's the gap between a coin toss and a strategy.

Why does a third option change the maths so completely? Two reasons, and both are about human nature more than strategy.

A single option invites the team to defend it. Everyone's energy goes into proving the one idea on the table will work, because there's nothing to compare it against. A third option forces actual comparison - attributes against attributes, not conviction against doubt.

And a single option, weighed against “do nothing,” often becomes a political fight disguised as analysis. Two camps, one winner. A third path gives the room somewhere else to look. People stop defending positions and start evaluating criteria.

This is dolphin thinking, in practice. Sharks fight for the kill - their option versus the alternative, win or lose. Carps follow the current - whatever's safest, whatever's been done before. Dolphins play with the problem until a third way surfaces, one that wasn't visible from either original position.

The next time you're staring down a “yes or no,” resist it. Not because yes-or-no is always wrong — sometimes it genuinely is binary. But check first.

What's the third option you haven't let yourself consider yet?

Peter

Source: Nutt, P. C. (1999). Surprising but true: Half the decisions in organizations fail. Academy of Management Perspectives, 13(1), 75–90.