Business decision-making:
To go or not to go

How to reach a decision on whether to go ahead

By Angela Civitella

Edited January 25, 2026

Major decisions rarely happen overnight. They usually follow extensive research, careful discussions about available options, and thorough comparisons of their advantages, disadvantages, and selection criteria. These investigations can take months, often involving many people and significant effort.

After investing so much time and energy in identifying the best possible option, it’s natural to want to move forward. Yet before committing, it’s important to pause and ask: is this still the right decision? Have circumstances changed since the analysis began—making the chosen option less relevant or more costly than expected? Perhaps the organization’s financial situation has shifted, or the potential returns no longer justify the expense.

You must evaluate whether or not you should go forward objectively, dispassionately, and on the basis of where you are now.

Reassessing your choice before implementation can be just as critical as the research that led to it. There are several tools you can use to make good go/no-go decisions. This article helps you identify the right tool for the right situation.

Understanding decision-making

When deciding whether to go ahead, you have to realize that the time and money you’ve already spent on the project are “sunk costs” – costs that cannot be recovered, and that you need to put behind you for decision-making purposes. You must evaluate whether or not you should go forward objectively, dispassionately, and on the basis of where you are now. It can take a lot of intellectual maturity to do this!

Uncertainty is one of the largest obstacles you face when making a decision – after all, very few decisions are made with full knowledge of the consequences. With this in mind, there are many articles on decision-making under uncertainty available, offering good approaches to manage it.

Whatever approach you use, it’s most important to have a methodical process for making the decision and to use solid decision-making tools. With these in place, it’s much easier to do what needs to be done each step of the way. In go/no-go decisions, as in any decision-making, your steps begin with defining the problem, developing criteria for a successful solution, and generating alternatives.

Go versus no-go

For go/no-go decisions, the choice often comes down to two clear options: move forward with the proposed change or maintain the current situation. While this might sound straightforward, these decisions can be complex, involving financial considerations, strategic priorities, and the readiness of people and processes to adapt.

To make sound decisions, you need to draw on two distinct but complementary sets of tools. The first group helps you explore the available options—understanding their implications, evaluating their potential benefits and risks, and testing key assumptions. The second group supports the actual decision-making process, guiding you in weighing evidence, applying criteria objectively, and reaching a conclusion that aligns with your organization’s goals.

In the sections below, we’ll look at both types of tools in more detail and show how they work together to support strong, rational go/no-go decisions.

‘As with any kind of decision-making, your steps begin with defining the problem, developing criteria for a successful solution, and generating alternatives.’

Exploring the options

With these tools, you’re making sure that you fully understand the options that you’re considering. In particular, you need to check for expected and “unexpected” consequences if your “go” option is implemented, and do the same if you decide not to go ahead.

Risk Analysis
Every decision you make carries risk, whether you decide to go ahead with change or stick with the status quo. You need to understand the risks you’re taking fully if you’re going to make a good decision, which is why analyzing risk is so important. The amount of risk you’re willing to take depends on your own attitudes to it, as well as the type of decision. And whether you make the decision alone or with a group also influences the amount of risk you’re willing to take. Groups are often more willing to take risks – sometimes in negative ways – because responsibility is shared among all members of the group.

Impact Analysis
is closely associated with risk analysis – an in-depth approach to brainstorming the possible positive and negative “unexpected” consequences of a decision. Here, you assess each option based on the likely impact it will have on the organization and its stakeholders: What could happen if you go ahead with a change? And what could happen if you keep doing what you’re doing now?

Six thinking hats
Like it or not, people have different decision-making styles, which can bias the process. This approach provides a formal way to use some of the most common styles (data-driven, intuitive, practical, realistic, optimistic, and creative) to examine a decision, so you can get the full benefits of each style. Again, apply this approach separately to the go and no-go options to provide a balanced exploration of each.

‘Personal interests, egos, laziness, and a strong desire to keep the status quo are forces that can stop even the most brilliant plans for change.’

Force-field analysis
This analysis provides a framework to capture what’s going on within your organization to either support or weaken each of your choices. Personal interests, egos, laziness, and a strong desire to keep the status quo are forces that can stop even the most brilliant plans for change, as are honest sources of opposition, for example, when the change conflicts with the organization’s culture and values.

On the other hand, there may be plenty of positive forces for change that can offset the negative forces. By completing an analysis like this, you’re not only able to predict your likelihood of success, but you can also identify opportunities for increasing the positive forces and weakening the negative ones.

Tools for making the decision

Once you’ve expanded your understanding of the decision that you’re taking, it’s time to make the go/no-go decision.

The approach you use here depends on the scale of the decision and its context.

For large, financially based decisions, there’s a whole discipline of financial evaluation that your organization’s finance department will be familiar with. This is a specialist subject that is beyond the scope of this article. If you’re not a finance specialist, the best thing to do is get your finance department’s help to ensure these evaluations are structured correctly.

‘Once you’ve expanded your understanding of the decision that you’re taking, it’s time to make the go/no-go decision.’

For smaller financial decisions, and for decisions that have non-financial elements to them (most decisions are not exclusively financial), there are a number of good techniques that you can use:

Cost-benefit analysis
is often the place to start when making this type of decision. List the costs of each option, based on the risks and impacts you identified earlier. Then make your best assessment of the benefits’ value (you can express these purely in financial terms, or include more subjective measures as well). This gives you a quick reckoning of whether your best option is worth implementing.

Cash flow forecasting
This approach takes you to the next stage by considering how your decision will unfold over time. This approach helps you to evaluate the monetary impact of making a change or staying with the status quo. Your decision ultimately has to make financial sense, and you need to know whether the change will be sufficiently profitable to justify all the consequences.

Decision tree
This decision support tool is useful when the outcome of a decision is particularly uncertain – for example, when launching a new product, it can be hard to predict future sales levels. The possible decisions are located at the ends of the branches (the “leaves” of the tree) and are reached based on decisions made at each stage.

Key points

Decisions are part of everyday life. Often, your decision is whether to go ahead with a solution or accept the status quo and do nothing. These are called go/no-go decisions, and they involve a thorough investigation of the problem from start to finish.

By treating exploratory work as a “sunk cost” and by following a clear process to decide between taking action and maintaining the status quo, you can ensure that the decision you make is the right one.

By using a go/no-go approach to decision-making, you’ll ensure that inaction is a proactive, conscious choice rather than the result of an inability to decide. Similarly, it helps you ensure that decisions to go ahead are made for good reasons, and not just because a project already has ‘momentum’ within your organization.

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