Why We Make Great Decisions for Others: Solomons Paradox

I put off cancelling a gym membership for four months.

Every time it crossed my mind, I ran the full drama in my head. A stand-off. A retention specialist trained in the dark arts of guilt. Me, agreeing to "pause for 3 months" because I couldn't get out of the agreement.

Honestly, it was straight out of that Friends episode where Chandler goes in to cancel his membership, and Ross walks out having signed up as well.

I was Chandler in my own head.

Then I finally walked in. The guy behind the counter asked why I was cancelling.

"How honest would you like me to be?"

"As honest as you feel comfortable being," he said.

Membership cancelled. Under five minutes.

The negotiation I'd been running in my head for months was not there.

This is embarrassing

I skipped out of there (metaphorically, skipping down stairs is not a skill I possess), but here’s what I noticed as I was reflecting on it later: I coach project leaders through this exact pattern every week.

I can spot a client avoiding a hard conversation with a stakeholder or a vendor from a mile off, and I'll tell them plainly that the delay is costing more than the conversation ever will. About someone else's stalling, I'm clear and decisive.

About my own? Four months of extra gym payments I didn’t need to make.

There's a name for this in human behaviour psychology. It's called Solomon's paradox, coined by psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross.

Named after King Solomon, celebrated for his wisdom in adjudicating other people's disputes, and remembered for the poor personal and political judgement that helped unravel his own kingdom.

Grossmann and Kross tested the pattern in studies of relationship conflict (2014), and found that people consistently showed more intellectual humility, openness to alternatives and willingness to compromise when reasoning about someone else's conflict .

The wisdom isn't missing. It's just harder to use when the problem is ours.

What is Solomon's paradox? The psychology behind our decision making

Personal stakes narrow perspective. Distance widens it.

That's it.

It explains something leadership teams live out constantly without realising: the same executives who'll tell a peer exactly why their project timeline is fiction will defend their own roadmap timeline with a straight face and without a hint of sensitivity to the irony.

Good advice is available in your own head. It's just filed under "things I'd tell someone else," not "things that apply to me."

Internal self talk can make that distance harder to close. We spend months negotiating with ourselves about a decision that, from the outside, would take five minutes.

This is why the fix isn't more information. Nobody in that gym negotiation, real or fictional, needed a better argument. I needed to close the distance between what I'd advise a friend and what I was doing.

The practical version of this, for a project or a portfolio leader is asking:

What would I tell a client or colleague sitting in my seat, looking at this exact capacity problem?

Then actually doing that.

That's perspective taking. It’s also part of strategic decision making, particularly when personal stakes are narrowing your view.

Left as an internal exercise, this only goes so far.

Grossmann and Kross's follow-up work found that the asymmetry reliably disappears the moment people view their own situation from an outsider's vantage point, which is precisely why leadership teams lean on a coach, adviser or structured third-party review rather than trying to self-distance in a meeting room under deadline pressure.

Perspective-taking is a skill, but it's also a resourcing problem: you can't fully occupy your own blind spot and see around it at the same time.

The point isn't to gather more information. It's to create enough distance to use the information you already have.

That's particularly relevant to the strategic decision making process around a project or portfolio, where personal stakes, competing priorities and existing commitments can make a situation harder to see clearly.

Where this shows up in retail leadership and project management

I see the leadership-team version of this constantly. Often a business can see clearly that a vendor is setting the pace, or that BAU load already exceeds capacity; when it's someone else's project! Looking at their own, the same signals get reframed as manageable, temporary, or something that will sort itself out.

They're just too close to see the pattern the way they'd see it if it wasn’t theirs. That's the whole case for a structured outside review before the next major project lands, not after it's already in trouble.

A Project Delivery Reset does the thing Solomon's paradox says you can't reliably do for yourself: it puts your capacity, your sequencing, and your leadership team alignment in front of the room like a case study, so the team can reason about it with the clarity they'd bring to someone else's problem.

If you can see the next big project on the horizon and you're not sure your team or your leadership table has the team alignment or bandwidth to absorb it, that's worth a day before it becomes a much longer conversation.

The same applies to team communication and the communication challenges that can sit underneath delivery problems. In retail project management, those problems can become retail challenges long before anyone labels them as a problem.

That makes decision making in project management less about having more information and more about getting enough distance to use the information you already have.

The question is not simply whether a decision can be made, but whether the people making it can see the situation clearly enough to make it well.

Decision making gets harder when you're too close to the decision.

Book a Project Delivery Reset and get the outsider's view on the decision you're too close to make alone.

Retail improvement, made practical.
Leadership thinking that drives change.

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