The phrase “it depends” is often treated as the enemy of decisiveness. In truth, it is the language of care, writes Rebecca Ward, MBA.
Ask a management consultant a direct question and you will often get two maddening words: It depends. The phrase sounds evasive, as though the speaker is dodging responsibility or refusing to commit. Yet those words hold more honesty than most definitive answers. They are the quiet truth of every profession that trades in judgement. Law is no exception.
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink both explore why humans struggle with ambiguity. We crave closure and clarity. We want to know. But good judgement, the kind that survives scrutiny, depends not on how fast we answer, but on how carefully we think before we do.
Let me ask you three questions:
Most people answer quickly. Kahneman would call that System 1, the fast, intuitive mode that loves neat stories. Slow the questions down, and the answers change.
The lawyer with the perfect record may have gone to trial once and won once. The 70 per cent litigator may be the advocate who takes hard matters to hearing and refuses easy settlements.
The GP may not have touched a laryngoscope for decades; the medical student may have just finished an emergency rotation and successfully intubated 20 patients this month.
And the bargain purchase? It breaks, ends up in landfill, and returns little to the Australian economy that trains the very professionals we rely on.
So yes, it depends. On context. On definition. On what the numbers hide.
The seduction of certainty
Gladwell popularised our faith in intuition, the elegant, split-second call, and also showed where it fails when experience is thin or bias is strong. For most of us, intuition needs calibration before it deserves trust.
Professions, especially law, evolve rituals to protect against that overreach: prima facie, subject to review, without prejudice. These expressions are more than formalities; they are seatbelts that remind us expertise must stay conditional. Judgement, when stripped of doubt, hardens into arrogance.
Kahneman’s work shows that overconfidence is among the most persistent biases in human decision making. The more specialised we become, the easier it is to mistake fluency for accuracy. The antidote is not paralysis but deliberate, structured hesitation.
When ‘it depends’ becomes uncomfortable
Ambiguity is tolerable until it touches mortality. Consider the binary classification of suicide.
If someone smokes every day, fully aware of long-term risk, is that slow self-harm? If someone takes a nightly mixture of diazepam and alcohol and never wakes, what do we call it: suicide, medical misadventure, or accidental overdose?
The answer depends. On toxicology. On the thoroughness of the investigation. On whether a note exists, or even a diary entry that might be misread. It depends on psychiatric history, timing, and context.
Each profession sees a different fragment of the same event. The coroner sees data. The family sees loss. The lawyer sees liability. None holds the whole. These differences aren’t pedantry; they are the texture of justice itself. The law lives in the details we instinctively simplify, and those details decide how a life is recorded and remembered.
How good minds go wrong
Pressure and hierarchy make overconfidence seductive. Classic studies, Irving Janis on groupthink, Stanley Milgram on obedience, Philip Zimbardo’s prison simulation, have all, in different ways, illustrated how cohesion, authority and role pressure can suppress independent judgement. (Their methods have been debated; the caution they recommend remains relevant.)
Modern practice is gentler but similar in effect. Organisations reward decisiveness, firms equate speed with competence, and meetings prize alignment over accuracy. Under those conditions, even bright minds default to quick certainty.
The correction is structural, not merely personal. Intelligence agencies use red-team reviews to attack their own assumptions. Aviation uses checklists to slow the moment before error. The law uses adversarial testing so that conclusions earn the right to stand. Across domains, the principle is the same: dissent is quality control for truth.
Law’s moral cadence
Lawyers live inside disciplined doubt. Every brief begins with an implicit question mark. The best advocates move between tempos, fast when urgency demands, slow when consequence requires. They understand that confidence without verification is simply risk in a better suit.
To say it depends is not to hedge. It is to acknowledge complexity, to respect causality, and to resist the illusion that any answer exists in isolation. It is the phrase that keeps the profession honest.
Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, described how small decisions can cascade through systems. The same is true in law: one unchecked assumption can bend an entire case. Disciplined doubt is the pause that prevents small errors from becoming systemic failures.
The courage to hesitate
“It depends” is often treated as the enemy of decisiveness. In truth, it is the language of care. It signals that context matters, that definitions shape outcomes, and that expertise without humility is fragile.
Kahneman reminds us how readily we grow certain beyond our evidence. Gladwell reminds us that speed, without reflection, can look like skill while remaining guesswork. Both point to the same virtue: the courage to hesitate.
So when a client, colleague, or reporter demands certainty, resist the urge to perform it. Hold the pause. Let the evidence breathe. In law, as in life, the measure of judgement is not how quickly we answer, but how carefully we think before we do.
Rebecca Ward is an MBA-qualified management consultant with a focus on mental health. She is the managing director of Barrister’s Health, which supports the legal profession through management consulting and psychotherapy. Barristers’ Health was founded in memory of her brother, Steven Ward, LLB.
