You Can Do Better Than Flipping A Coin

Half of business decisions fail.
No better than a coin flip.
You can do better.
I'll show you how.

That stat comes from Paul Nutt, a management researcher at Ohio State.

Like poker, business decisions are made with the information immediately on hand. And, like poker, even championship players lose hands.

But champions stack the odds. You may win a hand against them, but you play them long enough and they will crush you.

In business, the difference between champion and average joe starts with how you frame the question.

More than 70% of business decisions are framed as “Should we do this or not?”

Statistically, it’s the worst-odds set up you can use.
- You’re focused on a single option.
- There’s no clear objective.
- There’s nothing to compare against.

You’re literally stacking the odds against yourself.

But Nutt also found something powerful.
Just adding one more alternative cuts the failure rate by 20%.
And your odds keep improving with every additional option you consider.

So why don't we do this more often?

In a recent WASHI demo, I asked a manager to take any real business issue and reframe it — not as “Should we do X?”, but as an open-ended question about the outcome they were trying to achieve.

She hesitated — and admitted it was harder than she expected.

Like most of us, she was already focused on a potential solution.
But jumping to solutions too soon is what lowers our odds in the first place.

That’s why WASHI AI now flags narrow framing and suggests a better approach.

It will turn:
“Should we increase our performance ad spend?”
into
“What’s our best option for increasing the number of leads this quarter?”
—with ad spend as just one of several alternatives.

That simple reframing? Dramatically increases your odds of success.

Do that across every key decision your team makes, and you’re not flipping a coin anymore.

You’re playing like a pro.