Preface

This is a short book about what happens when no one is choosing.

We tend to explain outcomes with preference, intention, and decision. But many of the forces that shape lives, organizations, and products operate without being selected in the moment. They come pre-filled: inherited options, assumed baselines, paths of least resistance that quietly produce stability.

I call those structures defaults.

Think of it this way: when NASA pointed the Hubble telescope at a patch of sky that appeared completely dark—empty space, nothing there—they discovered thousands of galaxies. The emptiness was full of structure no one had thought to examine. This book does something similar. It points at the space before choice—the non-decisions, the inherited conditions, the things that were already there—and reveals a structure that shapes outcomes but rarely gets seen.

This is not an argument against free will. Choice is real. Agency matters. But choice operates downstream of something. Before you decide, there is already a situation: options that are present or absent, paths that are easy or hard, assumptions that are visible or invisible. Defaults are that upstream structure. The book is not about whether you can choose. It is about what is already in place before choosing begins.

The aim here is not to make you more decisive or more disciplined. It is to help you see when an outcome was chosen and when it was merely allowed to continue.

If this book works, you will finish it with a new reflex: when an outcome appears inevitable, you will ask not "Who chose this?" but "What kept happening when no one chose?"