In 2006, researchers at Columbia and Swarthmore followed 548 graduating students from 11 universities through their job hunts. The students who insisted on finding the best possible job landed starting salaries about 20% higher than the ones who looked for a job that was good enough. They were also less satisfied with the jobs they took, and they reported more stress, anxiety, pessimism and regret along the way. Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells and Barry Schwartz titled the paper Doing Better but Feeling Worse, and I can’t think of a better description of how a lot of managers make decisions.

The psychologists call those students maximizers. The other group, the ones who set a bar and took the first option that cleared it, are satisficers. Most management advice quietly assumes you should be a maximizer: gather more data, consider more options, find the optimal answer. After 25 years of watching managers decide things (and watching myself do it badly), I think that assumption costs more than it returns on most of the decisions that fill a manager’s week.

The idea came from studying organizations, not shoppers

The word “satisficing” belongs to Herbert Simon, who blended “satisfy” and “suffice” in the mid 1950s. Simon was not writing about people picking breakfast cereal. He was trying to explain how real people inside real organizations make choices when they can’t possibly know every option or calculate every outcome. His answer was that they don’t optimize. They set an aspiration level, search until something meets it, and stop. In 1978 he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research into decision making within economic organizations.

What gets lost in the pop psychology version is that Simon didn’t present satisficing as laziness or a compromise. He presented it as the rational response to limited time, limited information and limited attention. Those three limits describe a manager’s job better than any job description I’ve read.

Barry Schwartz and his colleagues later turned the idea into a personality measure. Their 2002 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology built a Maximization Scale and tested it across seven samples. Higher maximizing scores went with lower happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction, and with more depression, perfectionism and regret. Maximizers were also less pleased with their own purchases and more likely to compare themselves with other people.

Seven months and a spreadsheet with forty-one columns

Running IT operations at a large telecom, I once led the replacement of our network monitoring platform. The old tool was clearly past its useful life. It missed alerts, it couldn’t see half of the newer equipment, and the team had built a small ecosystem of scripts to cover its blind spots.

I wanted to get the replacement right, so I built an evaluation matrix. It started with a dozen criteria. Every vendor demo surfaced a feature nobody else had, and every one of those features became a new column so we could score everybody fairly. By month four the spreadsheet had 41 columns and five vendors, and we had scheduled a second round of demos because two of the scores were too close to call.

Meanwhile the old system kept missing things. During the evaluation we had a fiber cut on a regional route that the monitoring didn’t flag for close to an hour; a customer’s call to the service desk told us first. My team was spending real hours every week babysitting a tool I had already decided to throw out, because I hadn’t decided what to replace it with.

We picked a vendor in month seven. Looking back at the matrix later, the platform we chose had been in the top two after the first round of demos, in week six. Roughly five months of searching moved us from “one of two good options” to “the same option, now with more paperwork.” The cost of that certainty was a team running blind for five extra months and a manager who could recite the licensing terms of products we never bought.

That’s the part of maximizing nobody prices in. The search itself has a cost, it’s usually paid by somebody other than the person searching, and it rarely shows up in the post-decision review because the decision itself turned out fine.

The damage runs through regret, not through high standards

It would be easy to read the research as “lower your standards,” and that’s not what it says. The more careful follow-up work points somewhere more useful.

In a 2018 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Peng and colleagues surveyed 395 undergraduates and found maximizing correlated with regret at r = 0.45, a strong relationship for this kind of research. Maximizing also predicted lower overall well-being. When they added regret into the model, though, the direct link between maximizing and unhappiness all but disappeared. The unhappiness was traveling through regret. The same paper reviews earlier work suggesting the troublesome pieces of maximizing are the endless alternative search and the difficulty of committing, not the desire for a good outcome.

That matches what I see in managers. Wanting the work to be excellent is not the problem. The problem is the habit of keeping every door open, revisiting a hire after the offer is accepted, re-auditing a vendor after the contract is signed, wondering whether the other candidate would have been better. Maximizers don’t just take longer to decide. They keep deciding long after the decision is made.

Managers make a lot of decisions, so the regret compounds. If you’ve noticed you finish most weeks feeling like you got the big calls slightly wrong even when they worked out, that is worth paying attention to. It is a close cousin to the pattern in judging decisions by their outcomes, and it wears you down the same way decision fatigue does.

Some decisions do deserve the full search

Satisficing everything would be its own mistake. There’s a small set of decisions where I still think the extra search pays for itself:

• Hard to undo, expensive if wrong. Senior hires, firing decisions, a multi-year platform contract, a reorganization. If walking it back would cost months or damage people, spend the extra week.
• Rare decisions you have no reference point for. The first time your team chooses a vendor in a new category, you don’t know what “good enough” looks like yet. Search wide until you do, then set the bar.
• Decisions other people will live with longer than you will. If your team will work inside this choice for five years and you might be gone in two, they’ve earned a more thorough process.

Almost everything else (which tool for the team wiki, which of three solid candidates for a junior role, how to structure next quarter’s project plan, which training course) belongs in the satisficing column. A useful test is the one in treating most decisions as reversible: if you can change course in a few weeks at modest cost, the extra search almost never pays.

Set the bar before you start looking

The practical move is simple to describe and hard to do: decide what good enough means before you see the options. Once the options are on the table, every new one quietly raises the bar, which is exactly how my 12 criteria turned into 41.

What that looks like in practice:

Write three to five must-haves in advance. Not nice-to-haves. The things that, if an option has them, you’d be comfortable living with it. For the monitoring platform, ours should have been: covers every device class we run, integrates with our ticketing system, alert routing by on-call schedule, supportable by our current team, inside budget. Five lines.

Set a stopping rule. Either “the first option that clears the bar” or “the best of the first three that clear it.” Pick one before you start. The second is a reasonable middle ground for managers who can’t stomach taking the very first.

Put a date on the search. A search with no end date is a maximizing search, no matter what you call it. If the date arrives and nothing clears the bar, the bar was wrong or the market doesn’t have what you want; either way, that is new information worth acting on.

Close the door on purpose. When you choose, stop looking. Unsubscribe from the other vendors’ newsletters. Don’t reread the runner-up’s résumé. Schwartz’s work suggests that regret feeds on the options you keep comparing against, so stop giving it material. If something truly changes, you can reopen the decision deliberately; casual second-guessing doesn’t count.

Your team watches how you choose

The last cost is the one that took me longest to notice. A maximizing manager trains the team to wait.

If every recommendation your team brings you gets sent back for “one more option,” people stop bringing recommendations and start bringing surveys. If you redo a team member’s good-enough work to make it great, they learn that their bar doesn’t matter because yours will override it. If decisions sit with you until they’re perfect, your team’s pace becomes your search speed, and you become the bottleneck without ever meaning to be.

When I started telling the team our must-haves up front (“here’s what good enough looks like; bring me the first thing that clears it”), recommendations got faster and better. People could judge their own options against a bar they could see. That’s the quiet benefit of satisficing for a manager: it turns a standard that lives in your head into one your team can use without you.

High standards are part of the job. Making your team pay for an endless search for the best option isn’t, and most of the time the best option was one of the first two you looked at anyway.