As a leader, you’ll often find yourself in the position of mediating between groups with differing mandates. Maybe your product team is pushing to release a new feature as fast as possible, while your engineering team is focused on not accumulating too much technical debt. Or perhaps two engineering teams each want to use their own preferred framework for a new piece of functionality.
In these situations, it can be incredibly tempting to find a middle ground, some kind of compromise that seems to give everyone a little bit of what they want. But here’s the caution: often the best solution is not in the middle at all. Sometimes the optimal choice is to go all in on one path rather than splitting the difference.
There are two reasons this compromise mentality can be risky.
The middle ground may sound fair, but it can produce outcomes that are worse than either extreme. Supporting two frameworks does not give you flexibility, it gives you two parallel codebases, double maintenance debt, and fractured expertise. Splitting resources between two initiatives may look balanced, but it usually results in underfunding both and failing to realise value from either. What seems like balance in theory can in practice leave you with two broken, underpowered approaches.
The second problem is more psychological. Amos Tversky—one of the pioneers of behavioral economics—demonstrated that people have a systematic tendency to prefer middle options, a phenomenon known as the compromise effect. In his research with Itamar Simonson, they showed that when presented with three choices, people disproportionately pick the “in-between” option, avoiding extremes even when an extreme would be more rational. This extremeness aversion makes compromise feel safe, reasonable, even virtuous. But in practice it often leads to mediocrity. By aiming for the middle, we choose what feels least risky, not what delivers the most value.
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Tversky and Simonson discovered people have a tendency to choose the middle ground option, even when it’s objectively worse. Not you though. You’re too smart for that.
In short, when you’re making a decision between two competing paths, don’t default to compromise just to keep the peace. Sometimes the best route is to fully commit to one clear solution.
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