Not all decisions are equal (or why you shouldn't treat your hats like tattoos)

A common frustration I see when working with cultural organisations is around decision-making. It’s often too slow, it’s unclear who holds the power to decide, or even how decisions are made. And lots of the time decisions are reopened and discussed repeatedly until everyone is exhausted.

This isn’t just a process problem, it’s cultural too. How decisions are made signals who is trusted, how risk is understood, and how empowered people feel to act.

I can understand why this happens, because the stakes often feel very high. People with decision-making responsibilities are often operating on the very edge of their comfort zone, their role has perhaps been stretched to encompass a whole load of additional things that they don't have much experience with, or quite simply they don't feel they have the time to engage properly with the decision(s) they're being asked to make.

Alongside this, a wrong turn on a big project can unarguably be expensive, or politically tricky, or could risk damaging an organisation’s reputation. So organisations try to protect themselves by treating every decision with extreme caution.

So the problem is rarely a lack of effort or care. Instead I think it’s that all decisions are being treated as equal when in reality they really aren’t.

I recently came across a framing shared by Catherine Ferguson, originally from James Clear (the author of Atomic Habits), which feels incredibly useful - in it decisions can be thought of as hats, haircuts, or tattoos. It seems like a practical and simple way to check how much deliberation is actually required before moving forward.

• Hat decisions are low-stakes and easy to reverse. If you put on a bad hat, you can take it off again with little fuss.
• Haircut decisions are slightly higher stakes. A bad haircut takes time to grow out, but it isn’t permanent.
• Tattoo decisions are the most serious. They carry long-term consequences and are very difficult or expensive to undo.

It’s a neat metaphor and it helps to describe a dynamic I’ve seen again and again in cultural organisations - the tendency to treat hats like tattoos.

Why miscategorisation matters

When everything is treated as a tattoo, things grind to a halt. Every website colour change, every social media experiment, every test of a low cost tool or platform, every staff rota adjustment is treated as though it were irreversible. Leaders feel unable to delegate, staff are disempowered, time and energy that should be spent on creating and delivering work is instead spent in endless meetings and discussions.

The opposite problem is possible too. If everything is treated like a hat, decisions are made carelessly without sufficient analysis or governance. This is pretty rare in the cultural sector, but it does sometimes happen - usually where urgency or enthusiasm outweighs expertise and process.

Most often though, it seems, the imbalance is on the side of too much caution. That’s understandable because cultural organisations are often publicly funded, heavily scrutinised, and working with limited resources.

But if all decisions are categorised as tattoos, then nothing really moves forward, and everyone gets exhausted in the process.

The cultural impact of miscategorisation

Decision-making is not only a technical process, it’s cultural too.

When you treat every decision like a tattoo, you are sending an implicit message that "we don’t trust people to make choices". Teams are left second-guessing whether they are really empowered, and in turn experimentation and taking the initiative feels discouraged because no one wants to risk sticking their neck out.

Instead, when organisations clearly signal which decisions are hats, haircuts, or tattoos, it can build clarity and trust. Teams know where they can act autonomously and where they need to escalate. Leaders can focus their energy where it matters most, and everyone saves time.

A culture where people feel trusted to make 'hat-level' decisions is a culture where you can start to foster genuine feelings of agency, ownership and pride.

How to get better at decision categorisation

So how do you avoid falling into the trap of treating hats like tattoos? Here are a few practical steps that I think might help:

1. Label the decision. In meetings, explicitly ask is this a hat, a haircut, or a tattoo (or whatever language makes sense for you)? That simple question, asked upfront, can help establish clarity and prevents overthinking (or under-preparing).
2. Match your approach to the decision type. Don’t waste governance time on hats, a quick check-in is enough. Reserve the real deliberation for tattoos.
3. Delegate hats. Authorise and empower staff to make reversible, low-stakes calls on their own. It will speed things up, free up capacity, and build decision-making confidence.
4. Treat haircuts as a route to learning. A haircut that doesn’t work out isn’t a failure, it’s part of a learning process (if it goes wrong you probably won't go for a chunky fringe or electric blue again, or at least not in the same way!). Build in clear, structured opportunities to review and learn lessons when they crop up.
5. Be deliberate and thoughtful on tattoos. For tattoos, take the time you need - assemble the right evidence, involve the right people, and seek outside expertise where needed. Also consider the costs of reversal if you change your mind later. The test here is to ensure the decision genuinely aligns with your strategy and priorities, and plan in regular reviews to ensure that commitment and alignment is still true.

This is not about reducing scrutiny overall, it’s about aligning scrutiny with the appropriate stakes (and probably freeing up a load of time in the process).

A small change with big impact

One of the things I love about this framework is its simplicity. Cultural organisations don’t need another complex governance model, most already have more committees and approval structures than they know what to do with. What is going to be useful is simple, shared language and concepts that helps teams move faster without losing rigour.

"Hats, haircuts, tattoos" gives you exactly that. It’s memorable, it’s visual, and it can be applied at every level of an organisation from a box office manager wondering whether they can experiment with a new queueing system, to a board weighing up a major capital investment.

The benefit is not just speed of decision-making, but clarity of culture. When people know what type of decision they’re making, they can act with the right balance of confidence and care.

Don’t treat all your hats like tattoos

Cultural organisations will never eliminate risk, nor should they. Risk is part of creativity and progress, but risk needs to be matched to reality.

By recognising the difference between hats, haircuts, and tattoos, leaders can avoid wasting time, empower their teams, and focus their attention on the decisions that are most in need of their input.

Time is the one thing every cultural organisation I work with wishes they had more of and this simple shift might help free some of it up.

Or to put it more simply, don’t treat all your hats like tattoos.

More on this

Here are a few additional things I've come across that expand on some of the ideas I've touched on here:

• The four categories of decision making (IMD): "Decisions vary along two dimensions: control and performance. Control considers how much we can influence the terms of the decision and the outcome. And performance addresses the way we measure success. Combining them creates four categories of decisions"
• Satisficing: "Satisficing is a decision-making process in which an individual makes a choice that is satisfactory rather than optimal. It would require a great deal of effort – and may not even be possible – to gather all the necessary information in order to make the best decision, and satisficing thus represents the kinds of decisions we are actually capable of making. Satisficing is all about making ‘good enough’ decisions instead of perfect ones."
• What is decision-making (McKinsey): McKinsey describes many of the 'hat / haircut / tattoo' ideas but uses the much-more-McKinsey-language of 'Big-bet decisions / Cross-cutting decisions / Delegated decisions'
• Vroom–Yetton decision model: "This contingency theory model helps leaders determine the best decision-making process based on the situation’s nature and the importance of team involvement."