What do employees do when they don’t know what to do? How do they make decisions when the answers are not certain? What impact do their choices have on the bottom line? That is the thinking challenge. We’ve discovered, almost without exception, that employees choose a path or create a plan of action before they clearly understand the goals, desired outcomes, or consequences of their decisions. That is what we call the Scarecrow Syndrome: A mental trap of either/or decision making that fails to engage the best thinking in conscious pursuit of organizational goals.