How Do You Make the Right Decision When You Don't Know What You Don't Know?

Every senior executive makes decisions every day. Most are made quickly and confidently, based on incomplete information. That last part rarely makes it into the meeting notes.

The myth of the decisive leader — the one who reads the room, trusts the instinct, and calls it — is one of the most expensive fictions in business. Confidence is routinely mistaken for competence. Speed is routinely mistaken for clarity. In disciplines like business development, marketing, digital, social media, and public relations, the cost of confusing them compounds quickly.

The Information Problem

Marketing and communication change faster than the average decision-maker can keep track of. Algorithms shift. Audience behaviours evolve. What worked in the last campaign may actively undermine the next one.

A CEO making strategic decisions in these areas is frequently doing so without the depth of current knowledge the decision requires. This is not a criticism — it is a structural reality.

No leader can maintain expert-level fluency across every function their business depends on. The ones who believe they can make the most expensive mistakes. The information gap is not the problem. Failing to acknowledge it is.

The Adviser Problem

The quality of any strategic decision is determined less by the decision-maker's intelligence than by the quality of counsel available at the moment of choosing.

A founder with a brilliant instinct for product but a weak understanding of communications will make consistently poor communications decisions — unless someone in the room understands the discipline deeply enough to fill that gap honestly.

That adviser is not a vendor. They are not someone who executes briefs and reports on outputs. They are someone whose knowledge is current, granular, and honest enough to say what the decision-maker doesn't want to hear — before the decision is made. Most businesses hire for execution and wonder why their strategy underperforms.

A Framework for Better Decisions

Three things separate good strategic decisions from expensive ones.

Current intelligence — not last year's data or inherited assumptions, but validated, specific information about the audience and landscape the decision will operate in.

Disciplinary depth — someone who understands not just what to do, but why it works, when it doesn't, and what the second-order consequences of each option should be.

Honest counsel — the willingness to tell a decision-maker that the plan they're attached to is the wrong plan. This is the rarest of the three. It is also the most valuable.

What Good Decisions Actually Look Like

The best strategic decisions in marketing and communications share one characteristic: they were made with the right information and the right people in the room to interpret it.

The decision-maker didn't need to know everything. They needed to ask the right questions — and have an adviser who answered them honestly.

That combination is what separates businesses that perform consistently from those that run expensive experiments and call it strategy.

The room matters. You need to make sure that the right people are in it.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.

About Lighthouse PR

Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.

We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.

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