Some decisions are announced, implemented and filed away. Yet we still think about them: in the evening, in the car, in the middle of another meeting. I call this weight decision debt. It reveals itself in a sentence we say to ourselves.
Published on 2026-11-10 by Nathalie Lamborghini Dumas.
Some decisions are announced, implemented and filed away. Yet we still think about them: in the evening, in the car, in the middle of another meeting. I call this weight decision debt. It reveals itself in a sentence we say to ourselves.
May 2013. Paul Otellini steps down as CEO of Intel, then the world’s leading chip manufacturer. Before leaving, he spends several hours with Alexis Madrigal, a journalist at the American magazine The Atlantic.
He tells him about a decision made a few years earlier. Apple was preparing a product nobody had yet seen, the iPhone, and was looking for a chip to power it. The price Apple wanted to pay was lower than what the chip would cost Intel, according to the company’s forecasts.
The numbers said no. Otellini followed the numbers, and Intel did not get the business.
We know what happened next, and Otellini sums it up himself: the cost had been miscalculated, and the iPhone sold a hundred times more than anyone had imagined.
Otellini draws a lesson from this. He had often ended up deciding with his intuition during his career, and this time he should have followed it.
“My gut told me to say yes.”
I recognise this scene. I have seen it play out in many executive committees, and I have made several decisions of this kind myself.
This is what I call decision debt: a decision made against what we knew, or against what we felt, that does not close. The file is closed, but for the person who made it, the decision remains open. They keep coming back to it.
Did Otellini really know, when his numbers said otherwise? Yes, because we know in two ways. There is what we know through analysis: the numbers, the file, what we can demonstrate. And there is what we know through intuition: a perception, a sense of certainty we cannot always justify.
How can you tell whether a decision weighing on you is this kind of debt? Listen to the sentence that comes to mind when you think about it. There are two.
The first is “if I had known”. At the time of deciding, you lacked a piece of information. You chose with what you had, and nothing you knew or felt opposed it. If the decision turns out badly, you may regret it and pay the price, but with the same information you would make the same choice again.
The second is “I knew it”. This time, the information was there. It was not always in the file, but you knew, or you felt it, and you decided the opposite. Whether the decision succeeds or fails, you know you did not listen to yourself, and that is what keeps occupying your mind.
Otellini’s account contains both sentences. On the side of the numbers, it is an “if I had known”: as he points out himself, nobody then knew what the iPhone would become. On the side of intuition, it is an “I knew it”. And the lesson he draws is not about the lost business: it is about the intuition he did not follow.
One precaution, though. In hindsight, memory readily rearranges things. What matters is what we said, wrote or kept to ourselves before deciding.
Hence the question to ask yourself: at the moment of deciding, did you know or feel something you did not follow? If the answer is yes, there is a debt. If the answer is no, there is none, whatever the outcome.
A bad outcome hurts, but it is not a debt.
On 15 October 2023, France plays a Rugby World Cup quarter-final at home. The French team loses to South Africa, 29 to 28. By one point.
Three weeks later, head coach Fabien Galthié speaks to the press. He defends his game plan: “From a tactical standpoint, I would adopt the same strategy if I had to do it again.” Yet he does not hide what remains: a scar the team will carry for life, he says.
What hurts him is the outcome. His choices stand. From what he says, Galthié suffers from defeat, without debt.
The reverse is also true: success does not erase debt. Under Otellini’s leadership, Intel’s annual revenue rose from 34 to 53 billion dollars. Yet the journalist notes that the only regret he heard in his voice concerned that no to Apple.
Debt therefore cannot be read in the outcome. It can be read in the way we decided.
The question that interests me most remains: how can we avoid this debt from the outset?
Let us return to Otellini. His numbers said no, his intuition said yes. Whether he answered yes or no, he would go against one of the two. Choosing a side is therefore not enough.
My approach: listen to both at once, without letting one silence the other, until the decision becomes self-evident. This is what I call inhabiting your decision.
That does not mean waiting. Intuition is instantaneous: we feel it in the moment. It requires neither a major market study nor a long period of reflection.
Otellini already had it when he answered Apple. What he lacked was not time: it was giving it a place alongside the numbers.
An inhabited decision does not guarantee a good outcome. But if you had to do it again, with the same elements, you would make it again.
The outcome cannot be controlled. The debt can.
In our committees, does what we feel without yet being able to prove it have a place on the table, alongside analysis?
Writing assisted by AI.