184 | Two Great Decision-Making Techniques for When You’re Stuck Between Two Options

Have you ever found yourself going round and round in circles trying to choose between two options?

Perhaps you’re deciding whether to recruit externally or promote someone internally, introduce a new policy or stick with what you already have, invest in a new HR system or make the current one work, or even stay in your current role or apply for something new.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t thought hard enough about the two options. It’s that you’ve become so focused on them that you haven’t spotted another possibility.

In this solo episode of HR Coffee Time, Fay shares a real decision she recently struggled with while planning the 2027 edition of The Essential HR Planner, and how an unexpected suggestion helped her realise she had fallen into a common decision-making trap called narrow framing.

Drawing on ideas from Chip and Dan Heath’s brilliant book Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions, Fay explores two practical ways to widen your thinking and get unstuck when a decision feels like an either/or choice.

In This Episode, You’ll LearnWhat narrow framing is and how it can limit your decision-makingWhy the options in front of you may not be the only options availableHow to use the Vanishing Options Test to uncover different possibilitiesWhy asking someone else for their perspective can help you see what you’re missingThe questions to ask other people so you don’t accidentally keep them trapped inside the same narrow frameHow Fay used these ideas to solve her dilemma about whether to bring back the wire-bound version of The Essential HR Planner

Chapters[00:00] Introduction: Stuck Between Two Options

[00:28] Common Either/Or Decisions at Work

[01:22] The Book: Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath

[02:43] Fay's Dilemma: The Essential HR Planner

[04:27] Should the Wire-Bound Planner Return?

[05:14] Asking for Feedback to Get Unstuck