Dealing with Incomplete Information in Higher Education
September 13, 2026
By Kyle Farmbry, Co-Founder, Leadership Resilience Network
The information you wish you had isn’t coming. Decide anyway.
That's the reality of leadership in higher education right now, and it doesn't get easier with seniority. The program you may need to cut, the hire you may need to freeze, the policy response you have forty-eight hours to issue: none of these will wait for the data set that would make the call obvious. If you're leading through this year's institutional instability, you are, by definition, deciding with less than you'd like to have.
It's worth naming that discomfort directly, because most leaders don't. There's an unspoken expectation that senior leaders should gather enough information to make a confident, well supported call, and when that's not possible, the instinct is to hide the uncertainty rather than admit it. That instinct backfires. Leaders who project false confidence in ambiguous moments don't reduce anyone's anxiety; they make it harder for their teams to raise the questions that matter, and they make their own reversals look like failures instead of reasonable adjustments to new information. The leaders who hold up best under sustained ambiguity are the ones who can say, plainly, “here's what I know, here's what I don't, and here's how I'm deciding anyway,” and mean it as a sign of rigor, not weakness.
A framework helps here. Not because it removes the uncertainty, but because it gives you a repeatable way to move through it instead of re-litigating your whole decision process every time a hard call comes up.
Start with reversibility. Before anything else, ask whether this decision can be undone if it turns out wrong. A hiring freeze can usually be lifted. A program elimination or a reduction in force is much harder to walk back; the reputational and human cost is real even when the mechanics allow for it. Reversible decisions can be made faster and with less information, because the cost of being wrong is bounded. Irreversible ones deserve more time, more input, and a higher bar of confidence before you commit, not because you can wait for certainty, but because the downside of a bad call is asymmetric.
Define the minimum viable information before you go looking for it. Under pressure, it's tempting to keep gathering data indefinitely, because every additional data point feels like it's reducing risk. Often it isn't; it's just delaying a decision that won't get meaningfully clearer with more time. Ask what the smallest set of facts is that would actually change your decision. If a piece of data wouldn't change the call either way, it's not worth waiting for, however reassuring it might feel to have it. That single question is the fastest way to cut a sprawling information gathering process down to days instead of months.
Run a pre-mortem before you commit. Take fifteen minutes with your team and ask: imagine this decision fails in six months, what's the most likely reason? This isn't about talking yourself out of the decision. It's about surfacing the specific risk you're most exposed to, so you can build a mitigation into the plan now rather than discovering it later. A pre-mortem on a program cut might surface that the real risk isn't the budget math, but losing the faculty champions of adjacent programs who see the writing on the wall.
Know when to slow down and when to act fast. Reversibility and minimum viable information will tell you most of what you need, but there's a judgment call underneath both: is the cost of delay higher than the cost of being wrong? Sometimes a fast, imperfect response to a fast moving situation beats a well researched one that arrives too late to matter. Sometimes the pressure to “just decide” comes from discomfort with ambiguity rather than real urgency. Naming that trade-off explicitly, even briefly, is what separates a considered fast decision from a rushed one.
Guard against decision fatigue across the semester, not just within a single call. Any one decision is manageable; the problem is cumulative. A semester that requires five or six high stakes calls, each demanding real judgment under uncertainty, wears down the quality of judgment itself. Protecting against this is structural: batch lower stakes decisions so they don't compete for the same mental bandwidth, build in real recovery time between high stakes calls, and delegate decisions that don't require your particular judgment.
None of this makes the underlying uncertainty go away. But there's a real difference between deciding under ambiguity with a process and deciding by instinct alone. The framework won't tell you what to decide. It will tell you how to decide well, and how to keep deciding well through a semester that isn't going to slow down to make it easier.
The information you wish you had isn’t coming. Decide anyway, just decide on purpose.
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