The Action Bias

Monday morning, October 20th. Watching someone frantically "fix" a problem that would have resolved itself in two hours, and realizing our entire culture is built on the assumption that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

The Doing Imperative

You have a problem. Not an emergency—a problem. Something isn't working right. Someone is upset. A metric is down. A system is behaving strangely.

What do you do?

If you're like most people, you do something. You intervene. You adjust. You fix. You optimize. You reach out. You take action. Because that's what competent people do when there's a problem: they solve it.

Here's what actually happens: you make it worse.

Not always. Not in every case. But far more often than you realize. Because most problems—not all, but most—resolve themselves if you simply wait. The metric reverts to mean. The person calms down. The system self-corrects. The situation evolves in a way that makes your intervention unnecessary.

But you intervened. So now you've introduced a new variable. You've changed the system. And because you can't see the counterfactual where you did nothing, you'll never know whether your action helped, hurt, or was completely irrelevant.

This is the action bias: the deep conviction that doing something is always better than doing nothing, even when doing nothing would produce better outcomes.

Why We Can't Stop Doing Things

The action bias isn't irrational—it's evolutionarily hardwired. In ancestral environments, doing nothing when there was danger got you killed. Doing something, even if it was the wrong thing, at least gave you a chance.

But we're not in ancestral environments anymore. Most problems we face aren't physical threats requiring immediate response. They're complex social, professional, or technical situations where premature action often makes things worse.

Yet we still have the same hardwiring. When there's a problem, we feel compelled to act. Doing nothing feels passive, weak, irresponsible. Even when rationally we know that waiting would be better, emotionally we can't stand it.

Several factors reinforce this bias:

First: Action is visible. When you do something, others can see you doing it. When you do nothing, others might think you're unaware or don't care. So you act to signal competence, even when action isn't warranted.

Second: We get credit for action, not inaction. If you solve a problem through action, people praise your initiative. If you solve a problem by waiting for it to resolve itself, nobody notices you did anything. The incentives all push toward unnecessary intervention.

Third: We can't see the counterfactual. You can't know what would have happened if you'd waited. So when you act and things improve, you attribute the improvement to your action. When you act and things get worse, you attribute it to the problem being harder than expected—not to your action being counterproductive.

Fourth: Anxiety demands discharge. Sitting with a problem creates tension. Action provides relief. Doing something—anything—makes you feel better immediately, even if it makes the situation worse eventually.

The Cost of Unnecessary Action

Most of the damage caused by the action bias is invisible because we don't track counterfactuals. But here's what typically happens when you act on problems that would resolve themselves:

You interrupt natural recovery processes. Many systems—social, technical, biological—have built-in self-correction mechanisms. When you intervene, you often interrupt these mechanisms. The problem would have fixed itself, but your action prevented that from happening.

You introduce new problems. Every action has side effects. When you intervene in a complex system, you change things in ways you don't fully understand. Sometimes these changes create problems worse than the original one. But you won't realize this because you'll be focused on whether your action "solved" the original problem.

You prevent learning. When you immediately fix every problem someone faces, they don't learn to handle problems themselves. This is obvious in parenting—helicopter parents prevent their children from developing resilience. It's equally true in management, friendship, and technical systems. Constant intervention prevents the development of internal coping and correction mechanisms.

You create dependency. If you always act when there's a problem, others learn to expect your intervention. They stop trying to handle things themselves. They escalate immediately instead of waiting to see if issues resolve naturally. Your action bias creates a culture of dependency.

You waste resources. Every action has a cost—time, attention, money, social capital. When you act on problems that would resolve themselves, you're spending these resources unnecessarily. And because resources are finite, you have less available for problems that actually require intervention.

When Doing Nothing Is Doing Something

The alternative to action bias isn't paralysis—it's strategic inaction. This means consciously choosing to wait before acting, not because you're lazy or indifferent, but because waiting is often the highest-leverage intervention.

Strategic inaction requires distinguishing between different types of problems:

Problems that are actively getting worse require immediate action. If the building is on fire, you don't wait. If someone is in immediate danger, you intervene. If a critical system is failing in a way that will cascade, you act.

But these are rarer than you think. Most problems aren't actively degrading. They're just... problems. They exist. They're uncomfortable. But they're not getting measurably worse moment by moment.

Problems that might resolve themselves are the vast majority. Someone is upset but might calm down. A metric is down but might revert to mean. A conflict exists but might dissolve as circumstances change. A system is behaving strangely but might self-correct.

For these problems, the default should be watching and waiting. Not forever—you can set a timeframe. "I'll give this 24 hours / a week / until Friday to resolve itself. If it hasn't by then, I'll intervene." But starting with strategic inaction, not with action.

Problems that will definitely get worse if ignored are somewhere in between. These require action eventually, but not necessarily now. Often, waiting provides information that makes eventual action more effective. You learn more about the problem. The right solution becomes clearer. Stakeholders reveal their preferences. Conditions change in ways that make intervention easier.

For these, strategic inaction means waiting until you have better information or better conditions for effective action, not acting immediately based on incomplete understanding.

The Discipline of Waiting

Strategic inaction is harder than action bias. It requires:

Comfort with ambiguity. You have to sit with not knowing how things will turn out. This is psychologically uncomfortable. Most people would rather do something wrong than do nothing and not know.

Tolerance for others' anxiety. When others want you to act and you choose to wait, they'll often interpret this as indifference or incompetence. You have to be okay with that judgment.

Confidence in your judgment. You need to believe that your assessment—"this will probably resolve itself"—is correct, even without immediate confirmation. This requires experience and calibration.

Willingness to act when needed. Strategic inaction doesn't mean never acting. It means being ready to intervene the moment it becomes clear that the problem won't resolve itself. You're not avoiding action—you're timing it optimally.

The best practitioners of strategic inaction are constantly monitoring. They're not passive—they're actively watching, gathering information, assessing whether intervention is becoming necessary. But they're not acting until action is clearly required.

The Monday Reset

Here's what changes when you overcome action bias:

First: You solve fewer problems by not creating new ones. Most of your interventions would have made things worse. By waiting, you avoid this. The original problem resolves naturally and you don't add complications.

Second: When you do act, you're more effective. Because you waited, you have better information. You understand the problem more deeply. Your action is more targeted and less likely to have negative side effects.

Third: You build resilience in systems and people. By not intervening immediately, you allow natural coping and correction mechanisms to develop. Systems become more robust. People become more capable.

Fourth: You have more resources for real crises. You're not wasting time and energy on problems that would resolve themselves. When genuine emergencies arise, you have reserves to deploy.

Fifth: You're calmer. Constant action is exhausting. It generates a frantic sense that you must always be doing something. Strategic inaction lets you relax into watching and waiting. Most problems don't require your intervention, and that's actually fine.

The Counterfactual You Can't See

The hardest part of overcoming action bias is that you can never definitively prove you were right to wait. When you don't intervene and the problem resolves itself, you can always wonder: would it have resolved faster if I'd acted? What if things had gotten worse?

But here's what you can track: outcomes over time. If you develop a practice of strategic inaction—waiting 24 hours before responding to non-urgent problems, giving situations time to develop before intervening—you can compare these outcomes to your previous pattern of immediate action.

Most people who try this discover they were intervening unnecessarily most of the time. The problems that seemed urgent weren't. The situations that felt like they required immediate action usually resolved themselves. And the few cases where intervention was truly needed became clearer when they weren't mixed in with dozens of false alarms.

Start with low-stakes situations. Someone sends an emotional email. A minor metric dips. A small conflict emerges. Your instinct is to respond, to fix, to intervene.

Wait. Give it a day. See what happens.

More often than not, the person calms down, the metric corrects, the conflict dissipates. And you learn that your action would have been unnecessary—or actively counterproductive.

Once you've built this evidence for yourself, strategic inaction becomes easier. You've seen the counterfactuals, at least in small cases. You know that waiting usually works.

Stop Doing So Much

The action bias makes you exhausted, creates unnecessary problems, prevents natural resolution, and wastes resources. And you keep doing it because doing something feels more responsible than doing nothing.

But most problems don't need your intervention. They need time. They need space to evolve. They need to be left alone until it's clear whether they'll resolve themselves or require action.

This Monday, try doing less. When a problem appears, watch it instead of fixing it. When someone is upset, give them space instead of immediately trying to help. When a system behaves strangely, monitor it instead of adjusting it.

Not forever. Not in emergencies. But as your default: wait and see.

You'll solve most problems by not creating new ones. The few that require intervention will become obvious. And you'll have more resources—time, energy, attention—for the situations that actually need you.

The competent person doesn't rush to act on every problem. The competent person knows which problems need action and which need patience. Stop confusing motion with progress. Most of what you do is unnecessary. And the less you do, the more effective you become.

Action bias: the conviction that doing something is always better than doing nothing, even when doing nothing produces better outcomes. Most problems resolve themselves if you wait—the metric reverts to mean, the person calms down, the system self-corrects. But you intervene, changing the system, and can never see the counterfactual where you did nothing. Action bias isn't irrational—evolutionarily, doing nothing when there was danger got you killed. But most modern problems aren't physical threats requiring immediate response. We still feel compelled to act because action is visible, we get credit for action not inaction, we can't see counterfactuals, and anxiety demands discharge. Cost of unnecessary action: you interrupt natural recovery, introduce new problems, prevent learning, create dependency, waste resources. Strategic inaction means consciously choosing to wait. Problems actively getting worse require immediate action—rare. Problems that might resolve themselves are vast majority—default should be watching and waiting. Problems that will get worse if ignored require action eventually but not necessarily now—waiting provides better information. Strategic inaction requires comfort with ambiguity, tolerance for others' anxiety, confidence in your judgment, willingness to act when needed. Benefits: solve fewer problems by not creating new ones, more effective when you do act, build resilience, have more resources for real crises, calmer. Can't definitively prove you were right to wait, but can track outcomes over time—compare strategic inaction results to previous immediate action pattern. Start with low-stakes situations: wait a day on emotional email, minor metric dip, small conflict. Most problems don't need intervention—they need time and space to evolve.