The Decision Happens in Seconds. The Leadership Was Built Long Before.

Better real-time decisions depend less on thinking faster and more on what leaders and organizations have built before the pressure arrives

Written by: Adelee Penner

Abstract

Some leadership decisions arrive politely.

There is an agenda.

Background information.

A briefing note.

Time to consult.

Time to think.

Others arrive in the doorway.

A client is furious.

An employee has made a consequential mistake.

A system has failed.

A student is unsafe.

Someone has posted something publicly.

A project has suddenly gone sideways.

A critical piece of information has just changed what everyone thought was happening.

And now people are looking at the leader.

What do we do?

Real-time leadership decisions are fascinating because they expose something we do not always see when decisions are made slowly. Under pressure, leaders draw quickly upon accumulated experience, patterns, assumptions, relationships, habits, values, organizational routines, and whatever information happens to be cognitively available in that moment.

Current research suggests that several obstacles can degrade those decisions: acute stress, cognitive overload, bias, decision inertia, premature certainty, poor information sharing, and using a familiar response when the situation actually requires adaptation.

But there is another side to the evidence.

Experts can sometimes make remarkably strong decisions quickly. Teams can learn to shift rapidly between efficient execution and collective sensemaking. Decision environments can be designed to reduce predictable errors. And leaders can develop routines that create a small but consequential space between reacting and responding.

Perhaps the most important question is therefore not:

How do I become better at thinking quickly?

It may be:

What do I need to build now so that when the decision has to happen quickly, better judgment is available to me?

Some decisions give us time.

Others barely introduce themselves.

A staff member walks into your office and says, "Something has happened."

Your phone rings.

A meeting suddenly turns.

Someone gives you information you were not expecting.

You realize that continuing with the existing plan could make things worse.

People stop talking.

And then everybody looks at you.

There is no committee meeting next Thursday.

No opportunity to commission a report.

No perfectly prepared briefing package.

There is simply a moment in which something needs to happen.

What do we do?

I find these decisions particularly interesting because they reveal leadership in a different way.

When we have time, we can compensate.

We can gather more information.

Consult.

Edit.

Reconsider.

Ask another person.

Sleep on it.

In the moment, much of that scaffolding disappears.

What remains becomes unusually visible.

Our experience.

Our assumptions.

Our emotional regulation.

Our patterns.

Our biases.

Our relationships.

Our understanding of the organization.

Our ability to notice what does not fit.

And our willingness to say:

"Hold on. Something here needs another look."

Real-Time Does Not Mean Thoughtless

There is a tendency to divide decision-making into two categories.

Fast decisions are intuitive.

Slow decisions are analytical.

Reality appears considerably messier.

Experienced professionals frequently recognize patterns quickly because they have encountered enough variation to know what matters.

The response feels immediate because much of the learning happened earlier.

That distinction becomes particularly interesting in a very recent 2026 study.

Sunde, Zegners, and Strittmatter analyzed move-by-move decisions of professional chess players and compared them with computational benchmarks. Faster decisions were associated with higher-quality moves, even after several characteristics of the decision were considered. (DOI)

It would be easy to draw the wrong conclusion:

Think less. Decide faster.

That is not what the research establishes.

Professional chess players operate inside an extraordinarily developed domain of expertise. Their quicker decisions may reflect their ability to recognize that one option is comparatively strong without requiring extensive deliberation. More difficult or less distinctive configurations took longer and were associated with poorer choices.

So I would interpret the finding differently.

Speed may be a consequence of expertise.

It is not a substitute for it.

RESEARCH DEEP DIVE

What Emergency Decision-Makers Say Makes a Decision "Good"

Penney, Thompson, Codreanu, and Launder's 2024 study asked experienced decision-makers from fire, police, and health services to identify what constitutes a good or bad decision during emergencies.

Interestingly, they did not reach consensus on one definition.

That may initially sound disappointing.

I think it is revealing.

Participants treated decision quality as something more complex than whether the eventual answer turned out to be "right." They considered elements surrounding the decision—including what happened before and after it—to be highly important. (Wiley Online Library)

That distinction matters enormously for leadership.

Imagine two leaders make the same decision.

One noticed the problem, sought critical information, recognized the risks, made the best judgement available, communicated clearly, monitored the consequences, and changed course when new information appeared.

The other guessed.

If both happened to produce the same outcome, did they demonstrate equivalent leadership?

Of course not.

Real-time decision quality includes the process around the choice.

• What did you notice?

• What did you miss?

• What information did you seek?

• What assumptions were operating?

• Could you explain why you acted?

• What did you watch afterward?

• And what did you learn?

This gives us a much more useful standard than hindsight.

Obstacle One: Stress Changes the Decision-Maker

Time pressure and stress are not merely inconvenient features of difficult decisions.

They change what is cognitively available.

A 2024 systematic review by van Herk and colleagues synthesized 44 studies examining acute stress and decision-making. Their review found evidence that acute stress can impair cognitive, motivational, affective, and predictability-related processes involved in decisions. (ScienceDirect)

That means the person deciding under pressure is not simply the same decision-maker operating more quickly.

Stress can change attention.

Working memory.

How information is processed.

Which cues become salient.

What we remember.

How threatening alternatives appear.

This has a practical implication.

When pressure rises, leaders frequently respond by trying to think harder.

Sometimes what is needed is the opposite.

Reduce the noise.

Clarify the immediate objective.

Remove unnecessary decisions.

Ask for the critical information rather than all available information.

And create even a few seconds of cognitive space before reacting.

That tiny pause can matter.

Obstacle Two: We Can Become Certain Too Quickly

Pressure creates another temptation.

Closure.

Something has happened.

People want direction.

The leader recognizes a familiar pattern.

An explanation emerges.

And suddenly everything begins to be interpreted through that explanation.

That can be extraordinarily efficient when the pattern is correct.

It can also become dangerous when one important cue does not fit.

Research on adaptive expertise offers a useful distinction between routine expertise and the capacity to adapt when a situation departs from what we already know.

A 2024 study of decision-making in emergency departments found that practitioners moved fluidly between routine and adaptive practices, but uncertainty and disruption could interfere with their capacity to adapt. Particularly interesting was the influence of professional identity: feeling that an authority figure was supposed to look certain could reduce tolerance for uncertainty. When uncertainty could instead be approached with curiosity, adaptive behaviour became more possible. (Springer)

I think that translates powerfully into leadership.

The dangerous sentence may not be:

"I don't know."

It may be:

"I know exactly what's happening."

said two minutes too early.

Obstacle Three: Sometimes We Do Not Decide at All

The opposite problem also exists.

We freeze.

Decision researchers call one form of this decision inertia.

May and colleagues' 2024 immersive study placed 109 participants in a simulated terrorist incident. Higher decision-inertia scores were associated with more suboptimal decision outcomes. The researchers also found that information validity and confidence mattered in how people navigated the scenario. (Springer)

We can recognize versions of this outside emergencies.

The leader keeps asking for one more piece of information.

Keeps discussing the consequences.

Keeps imagining what might go wrong.

Keeps trying to find an option with no downside.

Meanwhile, the situation continues changing.

Sometimes deliberation is responsible.

Sometimes it becomes avoidance wearing the clothes of rigour.

Real-time leadership requires knowing when thinking is still improving the decision—

and when it is simply postponing one.

Obstacle Four: Our Brains Bring Bias Into the Room

We do not enter urgent decisions as neutral processors of evidence.

We bring anchors.

Recent information.

Prior beliefs.

Status-quo preferences.

Overconfidence.

Confirmation tendencies.

Framing effects.

Sunk costs.

And dozens of other predictable distortions.

Fasolo, Heard, and Scopelliti's 2025 integrative review examined 100 experimental studies of bias-reduction interventions. Their work distinguishes between debiasing, which equips the decision-maker to recognize and counter bias, and choice architecture, which changes the decision environment itself so better choices become easier to make. (Sage Journals)

This is important for real-time leadership.

We should not rely entirely on leaders remembering every cognitive bias while the proverbial building is burning.

Design the environment better.

Create thresholds.

Use decision rules.

Make critical data visually accessible.

Establish escalation criteria.

Build prompts into recurring decisions.

Clarify what requires consultation.

Give people authority in advance.

In other words:

Do not ask cognition to carry a burden that good design could remove.

Obstacle Five: The Leader May Not Possess the Most Important Information

Fast leadership can become dangerously solitary.

Especially when everyone believes the leader is supposed to have the answer.

Research on teams under stress has repeatedly raised concerns about how information gets exchanged. A 2025 review by Mojzisch and colleagues notes that stressful or threatening conditions can restrict information processing and communication. The review also highlights an important group-decision problem: revealing preferences too early can degrade decision quality because discussion begins organizing around positions rather than surfacing distributed information. (Springer)

That has an immediate leadership application.

If the leader begins:

"I think we should do X. Does anybody disagree?"

the conversation is already shaped.

Compare that with:

"Before I tell you where I'm leaning, what are you seeing?"

Same time.

Different information environment.

The second question gives the room a brief chance to become smarter than the leader.

Sometimes the Leader Needs to Direct. Sometimes the Leader Needs to Open the Room.

This may be one of the most important real-time leadership judgements.

Thommes and colleagues' 2024 work on adaptive leadership transitions distinguishes situations requiring process efficiency from those requiring collective sensemaking.

When the situation is familiar but urgent, directive coordination can be highly useful.

Roles are known.

The procedure works.

Time matters.

Execute.

But when something genuinely novel has happened, relying on hierarchy and proceduralized knowledge can interfere with the broader sensemaking the team requires. Adaptive teams need to recognize when the situation has changed enough that leadership itself needs to change modes. (Sage Journals)

That distinction gives leaders a valuable question:

Is this an execution problem or a sensemaking problem?

If we already know what needs to happen, coordination may be the priority.

If we do not understand what is happening, directing everyone more forcefully may simply allow us to be wrong faster.

Team Support Is Part of Decision Infrastructure

Real-time decision-making is also social.

Younas and Khanum's 2024 study of 347 physicians found that team support was associated with greater decision satisfaction under uncertainty and time pressure, while perceived stress was associated with decision conflict. Their study is situated in obstetric and gynecological care and uses self-report data, so it should not be generalized indiscriminately, but the organizational implication is useful: the quality of the surrounding team matters when people decide under pressure. (Sage Journals)

Leaders therefore need relationships that work before the crisis.

People who will challenge them.

People who know when to interrupt.

People who can say:

"You're missing something."

And leaders who can hear that sentence without interpreting it as insubordination.

TRY THIS IN PRACTICE

The 30-Second Decision Check

When the moment genuinely requires a decision now, use six questions rather than trying to remember an elaborate model:

1. What is actually happening? Separate the observed facts from the story you are already telling about them.

2. What matters most right now? Safety? Continuity? Trust? Time? Evidence? Identify the immediate priority.

3. What doesn't fit? Look deliberately for one cue that challenges your first interpretation.

4. Who knows something I don't? Ask before announcing your preferred answer whenever time allows.

5. What must be decided now—and what can wait? Do not turn one urgent decision into six unnecessary ones.

6. What will tell us to change course? Decide what you will monitor before action begins.

This does not make the decision slow.

It makes the thinking disciplined.

The Best Real-Time Decision Practice May Happen Afterward

One of the most important findings from the current decision literature is the value of feedback.

Fasolo and colleagues identify feedback on judgment accuracy and decision quality as one of the mechanisms available for debiasing future decisions. (Sage Journals)

That suggests a practice that organizations often neglect.

After an in-the-moment decision, go back.

Not simply when something went badly.

Ask:

What did we notice first?

Which assumption shaped the decision?

What information arrived too late?

Who had information we needed?

Where did stress show up?

What did our procedures help us do?

Where did they get in the way?

Would we make the same decision again with the information available at that time?

What should become easier next time?

That is how experience becomes expertise.

Simply accumulating years does not guarantee it.

Rehearse the Judgement, Not Just the Procedure

This is why simulation matters.

Organizations routinely practise procedures.

Fire drills.

Cybersecurity protocols.

Emergency response.

Business continuity.

But I think leadership teams can rehearse judgment too.

Give them ambiguous situations.

Remove one expected piece of information.

Introduce a conflicting cue halfway through.

Ask one person to hold information that the others do not have.

Change the conditions after a decision has been announced.

Then watch.

Who speaks first?

Who gets listened to?

Does the leader ask before declaring?

Does uncertainty produce curiosity or control?

Can the team switch from execution to sensemaking?

Does anyone notice that the original frame no longer fits?

The objective is not to predict every possible crisis.

It is to develop the adaptive muscles required when reality refuses to follow the script.

Better Fast Decisions Require Slower Organizational Work

Perhaps this is the paradox.

We want leaders who can make strong decisions quickly.

But the capacity to do that is developed slowly.

Through experience.

Reflection.

Feedback.

Practice.

Trust.

Clear authority.

Shared language.

Understanding context.

Making mistakes while the stakes are still manageable.

Learning where your own judgement tends to fail.

Building relationships with people whose thinking complements yours.

Creating organizational systems that put good information where it will be needed.

That work is almost invisible during the moment itself.

But then the moment arrives.

And suddenly it is everywhere.

A Final Provocation

What if the quality of a leader's 30-second decision tells us less about how quickly they can think than about what the organization has spent years helping them learn?

When pressure arrives, leaders will have obstacles.

Stress.

Bias.

Incomplete information.

Competing priorities.

Fear of consequences.

Other people waiting.

The desire to look certain.

The temptation to act immediately.

And sometimes the temptation is not to act at all.

We cannot remove all of those things.

But we can design for them.

We can build expertise without rigidity.

Create routines without becoming trapped by them.

Distribute intelligence.

Make challenge safe.

Clarify decision authority.

Practise switching modes.

Provide useful information.

Review decisions without hindsight punishment.

And teach leaders that a pause—even a very small one—is not evidence that they do not know what they are doing.

Sometimes it is evidence that they do.

Because the objective is not simply to make the decision quickly.

It is to make the best decision this moment allows—and remain ready to learn from what happens next.

Reflective Questions

When something unexpected happens, what does your leadership instinctively do first?

Which decisions in your organization genuinely require real-time judgment, and which ones have become artificially urgent?

Where does stress make your own decision-making narrower?

What familiar patterns are most likely to cause you to reach closure too early?

Who in your organization can interrupt a senior leader's thinking in the moment?

When someone has information that contradicts the leader's preferred interpretation, how easily can that information travel?

Does your organization distinguish situations requiring rapid execution from those requiring collective sensemaking?

Which recurring decisions could be improved through clearer thresholds, prompts, information design, or delegated authority?

How often do you review how a decision was made rather than simply judging its eventual outcome?

And perhaps the question worth taking into your next leadership conversation:

What are we building now that will improve the decision we may have only 30 seconds to make later?

Let's talk again soon. Take good care of yourself.

Adelee

References

Fasolo, B., Heard, C., & Scopelliti, I. (2025). Mitigating cognitive bias to improve organizational decisions: An integrative review, framework, and research agenda. Journal of Management, 51(6), 2182–2211. DOI: 10.1177/01492063241287188. (Sage Journals)

Gamborg, M. L., Mylopoulos, M., Mehlsen, M., Paltved, C., & Musaeus, P. (2024). Exploring adaptive expertise in residency: The (missed) opportunity of uncertainty. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 29, 389–424. DOI: 10.1007/s10459-023-10241-y. (Springer)

May, B., Milne, R., Dalton, G., Meenaghan, A., & Shawyer, A. (2024). An exploratory study on manifesting decision-inertia in a 360-degree extended reality terrorist incident. Cognition, Technology & Work, 26, 401–416. DOI: 10.1007/s10111-024-00761-x. (Springer)

Mojzisch, A., Bahr, J.-H., Roswag, M., & Häusser, J. A. (2025). Effects of acute stress on group decision-making: Taking stock and looking ahead. Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie, 56, 523–536. DOI: 10.1007/s11612-025-00824-1. (Springer)

Penney, G., Thompson, M. B., Codreanu, T., & Launder, D. (2024). Insights into decision-maker's perceptions of good versus bad decisions in emergency services—A modified Delphi study. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 32(3), e12613. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12613. (Wiley Online Library)

Sunde, U., Zegners, D., & Strittmatter, A. (2026). Speed and quality of complex strategic decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(20), e2531472123. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2531472123. (DOI)

Thommes, M. S., Uitdewilligen, S., Rico, R., & Waller, M. J. (2024). Switching gears: How teams co-construct adaptive leadership style transitions in dynamic contexts. Organizational Psychology Review, 14(4), 542–570. DOI: 10.1177/20413866231214238. (Sage Journals)

van Herk, L., Schilder, F. P. M., de Weijer, A. D., Bruinsma, B., & Geuze, E. (2024). Heightened SAM- and HPA-axis activity during acute stress impairs decision-making: A systematic review on underlying neuropharmacological mechanisms. Neurobiology of Stress, 31, 100659. DOI: 10.1016/j.ynstr.2024.100659. (ScienceDirect)

Younas, S., & Khanum, S. (2024). Examining the role of stress and team support in decision making under uncertainty and time pressure. MDM Policy & Practice, 9(2). DOI: 10.1177/23814683241273575. (Sage Journals)