Bureaucracy: Overcoming “Fear” of Making Decisions
Courage is a different kind of knowledge, the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared, and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. – David Ben Gurion
The other day, I attended a social event where I met a local MLA who had served as a minister about 15 years ago. At the time, I was the Municipal Commissioner of Hyderabad. During our conversation, he compared today’s officers with those of the past. He observed that officers today operate with a greater sense of fear and that the system no longer delivers results on its own.
What kind of fear was the MLA referring to?
In his book Decision Velocity: Rational Abdication, the Fear Tax, and the Road to Viksit Bharat, O. P. Singh identifies the source of this fear: almost every decision can later be linked to a rule violation or to a perceived benefit to someone.
As an officer in a position of power once told me, “Show me an officer, and I can start an inquiry against him.”
Another officer implementing the Smart Cities Mission once asked me not to insist on settling tenders. He had a long career ahead of him, he explained, and awarding a contract could expose him to a retrospective - and often punitive - inquiry into an administrative decision that had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
The message is clear: even the most well-intentioned and logical decisions can be second-guessed years later. An officer may then have to defend the decision through an inquisitorial process. Under such circumstances, not deciding - or simply doing nothing - can become a rational survival strategy.
But the consequences do not stop with officers. This fear gets transmitted to citizens, not necessarily as fear itself, but as what O. P. Singh calls the “fear tax.” It is the price society pays when decision-makers conclude that the safest course is not to decide at all.
Officers themselves, however, do not escape the damaging effects of indecisions.
First, decision-making comes with practice and officers become better and faster decision-makers by deciding on a variety of issues. They develop judgment through experience. When they stop deciding, that judgment begins to rust. Over time, they risk designing policies that become increasingly disconnected from reality.
Second, choosing ease and safety at the expense of conviction creates a widening gap between who you are and how you behave. When you repeatedly act in ways that do not reflect your genuine thoughts or values, the psychological cost accumulates. It rarely arrives as a dramatic breaking point. Instead, it manifests quietly and persistently: in lower self-esteem, heightened anxiety, and a growing sense of disconnection from yourself that may be difficult to articulate, but is impossible to ignore.
So, under these circumstances, must you wait for the decision-making environment to become “safe” before you act?
Not necessarily.
The experience of Tukaram Mundhe offers some useful lessons. His zero-tolerance approach to unsanitary kitchens and dark stores has won him admirers while unnerving parts of the industry.
The Bombay High Court, however, offered a more nuanced assessment. It observed:
“In the last 20 years, this is probably the first time that some officer has been doing a laudable job and ensuring all eateries comply with the relevant laws. You are doing a great job. Someone is doing the correct thing, and the public is lauding you. But just ensure not to be biased or unfair. Your medication should not worsen the treatment. What you are doing now is you are shooting first and asking questions later.”
The Court applauded Mundhe’s audacity but also called for balance. The learning is: effective leadership requires a combination of abilities and traits that may sometimes appear contradictory.
Consider a district magistrate during local-body elections who had to take strong action against supporters of a ruling-party MLA. The predictable consequence was an immediate transfer. Yet she did not stop at taking strong action. She actively engaged with the political executive, built support for her decisions, and made pragmatic compromises by treating some situations as conflicts of interest rather than conflicts of principle.
In short, she combined two qualities that are often assumed to be incompatible: disrupting the status quo and being pragmatic. In this case, being politically astute.
There are many other dualities worth cultivating:
Being assertive while remaining empathetic;
Taking risks (audacious) while still being reluctant;
Being ambitious while knowing when to step back;
Being principled while remaining open to compromises; and
Moving quickly while knowing when to pause.
The way forward, therefore, is not to eliminate fear or wait for the system to become completely “safe.” It is to develop contradictory abilities and, more importantly, the judgment to deploy each of them in the right setting.
This approach can reduce the risks associated with decision-making and help officers overcome the fear of acting. It also sharpens their judgment and strengthens their decision-making muscles.
Most importantly, it allows them to behave in ways that reflect what they genuinely think and feel. That can make them happier and give them a deeper sense of stability. Not because their lives have become easier, but because they are no longer divided against themselves.
