Decision Making for Leaders Is Not About Being Decisive

Decision making for leaders is not about being decisive. It is about surfacing what a commitment rests on, testing whether enough is known to proceed, and building a monitoring condition before the decision leaves the room. Speed without that structure is how organisations lock in the wrong call.

On 15 January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 hit geese after take-off from LaGuardia and lost both engines. The crew had about 90 seconds to decide. The cockpit voice recorder, preserved in the National Transportation Safety Board accident report, does not sound like a seminar on bold leadership. It sounds like people working the problem. Sufficient certainty is the point at which a leader knows enough to act on a decision, even though uncertainty remains. That is the stopping rule I trust in decision making for leaders. Not posture or volume, and certainly not the little leadership rituals that keep advisers and committee furniture in work.

You are probably here because you have a live decision in front of you, perhaps a plant closure or a hiring call that will shape the next year. What you need is not more theatre. You need to see what the decision rests on, which assumption is weak, and what you will watch after the decision leaves the room.

I have spent much of my working life watching accountable leaders perform certainty for the room while the real uncertainty sits untouched on the table. The Universal Decision-Making Method is my attempt to make that work visible. I do not think decisiveness is a virtue on its own, and I have never had much patience for the leadership trade that confuses stage presence with judgement.

Decision making for leaders is the discipline of making a choice by naming what it rests on and judging when there is enough to act.

What decision making for leaders usually means

Most leadership advice still mistakes visible certainty for good judgment. Say it crisply. Do not flinch. Make the room feel the force of your confidence. That is not decision making for leaders; it is stagecraft with a badge. Real decision making starts when a leader can state the basis of the call in plain English and show the room what would make that basis fail.

I use the term Deciders for the people who are actually accountable, because accountability is the whole point. A Decider does not need applause. They need to know what they are choosing, what they are assuming, and whether the assumptions are strong enough to deserve action. I have never met a board that improved a choice by admiring itself for decisiveness.

If you came here for a blessing on gut feel, keep walking. Good leaders can often move quickly, but only after they have made the basis visible enough to challenge. That is why I am so unimpressed by the theatre around decisiveness in leadership; speed without a stated basis is just a fast way to be wrong.

Why the leadership advice is backwards

The leadership-advice trade also gets the cause and effect backwards. Decisions are usually slowed by apparatus, not by a shortage of bravery. Committee papers swell. Risk registers breed. The room goes wide-eyed, and nobody says which assumption is carrying the whole thing. That is also why problem solving in the workplace often stalls: the group stays in commentary mode and never gets to the actual decision.

Exhaustion is often the residue of that bad process. You see it in organisations where executive decision fatigue sets in because every choice has to crawl through the same ceremonial sludge. Leaders start dragging themselves around like a broken appliance, then call the resulting torpor wisdom. Charming, in the way damp carpets are charming.

The trait model suits consultants and committees because it turns a process failure into a personality problem. If the team keeps circling without naming what it is relying on, you are not in deep thought. You are in analysis paralysis with better stationery.

Click to expand

The leader who decided in 90 seconds

People retell the Sully case as instinct because instinct flatters leaders. The official account is less romantic and more useful. The NTSB report on the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 records a crew working in sequence after the bird strike, attempting restart, discussing diversion options with air traffic control, and revising what the decision rested on as height disappeared.

The line that matters comes late, with the aircraft at about 200 feet and the Hudson now the live option. Captain Sullenberger still asks the co-pilot, "Got any ideas?" That is not hesitation. It is a leader keeping the channel open until the last responsible moment. The answer, "Actually no", is useful because it closes the loop honestly.

I use this case because it strips the romance out of leaders deciding under pressure. The timescale was savage. The work was ordinary. That is the useful part. If you want a cleaner phrase, this is what decision making for leaders looks like when vanity has been forced out of the cockpit.

Take the decision you have been delegating upward and work out whether you already know enough to commit. Start the Walk →

What decision making for leaders actually needs before deciding

I start in a ruder place: what is this decision for, and what weak assumption is carrying it? Everything after that is presentation. If the Purpose is muddy, the rest of the conversation will become theatre very quickly.

I have watched this pattern often enough. An organisation states a fine Purpose, then pours its budget and energy into apparatus that barely touches that Purpose. Nobody in the building lacks decisiveness. What they lack is alignment. The stated objective sits on a shelf while committees congratulate themselves on volume. By the time a leader looks up and asks why the work is not reaching the point, the answer is usually uncomfortable: because we were busy on the wrong thing.

That is why I am impatient with generic advice about making hard calls. Difficulty usually means high significance. The outcome depends heavily on a weak assumption. Either get better information, or change the decision so it depends less on that assumption. Sometimes the honest answer is a different option. I walk through that translation in making difficult decisions as a leader.

Senior people often mistake airtime for leadership. They speak first, the room bends around them, and then everyone pretends a discussion took place. I have seen it in rougher settings too: picture an emergency water-pipe repair crew. One leader asks where the traffic barriers should go. Another says the crew may still be there after dark, with school traffic about to build, then asks for ideas. The second leader gives Purpose and Context. The crew can actually think. If you open with your conclusion, you get compliance and silence. In my experience, experts help keep this nonsense alive because selling a model is safer than owning a decision.

How decision making for leaders works in strategy

Strategic decisions are not a superior species. They are ordinary decisions whose assumptions live longer and sit in a wider Context. If the board calls something strategic, that usually means the monitoring burden will last longer, not that the laws of deciding have changed.

Pilots have a blunt phrase for one failure mode, got-to-get-there-itis. The destination becomes the point. The larger Purpose, living to fly another day, gets pushed aside. Commercial airlines counter that with pre-loaded go-around rules set when people are calm. Leaders need the same discipline. Set the rule for abandoning an initiative before the initiative starts flattering your ego.

The 2011 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report showed the other trap. Banks let models speak as if the models were the decision, and the assumptions about a benign, stable environment sat underneath the printouts. That is the ugly little trick. Paper looks objective right up until the world stops behaving like paper. I wrote about that failure in strategic decision making for leaders.

When the strategic challenge is really about defining the right problem before solving it, strategic problem solving shows the same move in a different outfit. Strategy is just decision making with longer consequences and more people pretending not to notice.

The process leaders actually need

I do not need five leadership traits and I doubt you do either. I need a leader who frames the decision properly and names the weak assumption while somebody can still challenge it. Once that has happened, sufficient certainty becomes a practical judgement instead of a mood, and monitoring follows because the room already knows what drift would look like. I wrote separately about what effective decision making in leadership actually requires, because the answer is not courage or vision. It is making the assumptions visible before authority hardens into action.

That is the logic inside the Universal Decision-Making Method. If you want the full mechanics, the decision-making frameworks hub and the method page do that work. What matters here is simpler: hierarchy distorts conversation and ego distorts stopping rules. Showmanship gets rewarded because it is easier to admire than thought.

Cockpits and operating theatres do not worship solo brilliance. They design against it. People with deep skill still challenge each other step by step because the cost of private certainty is too high. The accountable leader is no different. What they should not do is protect the decision from scrutiny in the name of authority.

The Erebus disaster remains one of the bleakest reminders. The Mahon Report of the Royal Commission on the Mount Erebus disaster dealt with a small administrative change to the navigation coordinates given to Air New Zealand Flight 901. It was not properly communicated, the pilots flew an automated track into terrain they could not see, and 257 people died. That is what happens when a minor decision moves quietly through a system that assumes somebody else is watching. If you are carrying a serious decision now, do not confuse solitude with strength. Build the cross-check and make sure implementers understand the assumptions behind the job they have been given. Solitude is not strength. Unchecked authority is just private certainty with better furniture.

---

Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.