More options should mean better decisions. The count is not what stalls a leader, though — what stalls them is the cost of justifying whichever one they pick. Every additional viable path adds a rival that the chosen option will be measured against afterwards, and the person deciding is the person who will be asked why they did not take it. So the safest-feeling move is to gather one more piece of evidence, which is also the move that never ends.

Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting table in a California grocery store, alternating between twenty-four varieties and six. The large display pulled the bigger crowd, which is what most people expect. It also sold far worse: shoppers who tasted from the six-jar table bought at roughly ten times the rate of those who faced twenty-four. Nobody was confused about jam. They simply had no defensible way to conclude that any one jar was the right one, and walking away is the only option that never has to be defended.

Inside a company that same move wears the costume of diligence. A launch date slips into a review, the review generates a request for more data, and the data surfaces a path nobody had considered — which restarts the count. Nothing in the sequence announces itself as avoidance, because each individual step is defensible on its own. The tell is not how long the deliberation runs but which direction it moves: options being added late is the symptom, options being eliminated is the progress.

The fix is not fewer choices. It is settling in advance what would make one good enough, so the decision has a stopping rule instead of a comparison that can always be extended.