Why capable leaders can make decisions that seemed entirely reasonable at the time.
Julie Goddard, creator of i3 Leadership · 5-minute read · First published 2025, revised 2026
Capable leaders rarely make poor decisions because they have stopped thinking. More often, pressure gradually changes what they can see, while the decision itself still feels entirely reasonable. This piece explores why that shift is so hard to notice from the inside, and what leaders can do to catch it.
One question has come to sit closer and closer to the centre of my work: what happens to good leaders as pressure builds?
I am thinking particularly of the experienced, capable leader who cares about doing a good job and understands what is at stake if things go wrong. Leaders like this do not suddenly forget everything they know when demands rise. And yet most of us can point to decisions made by intelligent, conscientious people that are remarkably hard to make sense of afterwards.
When we look back at those decisions, we usually ask what the leader got wrong. Why did they miss the warning signs? Why did they persist with something that clearly was not working? Why did they not listen to the people around them?
Those are fair questions. I have come to think there is an earlier one.
What did the situation look like to them at the time?
Every decision begins with perception. Before we can decide what to do, we have to make sense of what we think is happening, and human perception is selective and interpretive long before pressure enters the picture. We notice some things and miss others. We lean on experience, assumptions and mental shortcuts to manage complexity. We tend to find what we expect to find. None of this is peculiar to leaders; it is how people make sense of a complicated world.
Pressure changes the conditions in which that already imperfect process happens. Time shortens. Consequences grow. Information arrives incomplete or contradictory. People are waiting for an answer. There may be a regulator watching, money at stake, reputational risk, or very real implications for the people on the receiving end of the decision.
Through all of this, the leader may still be thinking carefully, and the decision may still feel entirely rational. That is precisely what makes the shift so hard to recognise.
Hindsight gives us the one thing the decision-maker did not have: the outcome.
Once we know how things turned out, the warning signs stand out. The information that deserved more weight looks obvious, and the alternative looks clearer than it ever did in the moment. It becomes easy to conclude that the leader must have ignored something plainly in front of them.
Sometimes that is exactly what happened. People do protect their position, dismiss unwelcome information and hold on to a decision long after there is good reason to revisit it. I would not want to pretend otherwise.
I just do not think that explains everything. The more interesting possibility, and in my experience a common one, is that the situation genuinely looked different from where the leader was standing.
A decision can rest on incomplete information and still be carefully considered. A leader can listen to other views and still give one interpretation too much weight. A leader can believe the team is being kept focused while the information most needed is becoming harder to hear, or work hard to protect the organisation from one risk while growing less alert to another.
None of this has to feel irrational from the inside.
None of this has to feel irrational from the inside.
Talk of leadership under pressure tends to conjure a crisis: something has gone badly wrong, the clock is running and someone has to make the call.
Those moments matter. In most of the organisations I work with, though, pressure is sustained rather than sudden. Another vacancy that cannot be filled. Another set of figures to explain. Another regulatory requirement, another difficult conversation, another decision that cannot wait for perfect information.
Leaders can work in those conditions for months, sometimes years. There may never be an obvious point at which things change. Meetings still happen, problems still get solved, the days still get done. The pressure simply becomes part of the environment.
What concerns me is that something can become normal without becoming harmless.
Most leadership development, reasonably enough, focuses on what leaders do. We help people have difficult conversations, build trust, delegate, lead change and make decisions. I do all of that in my own work.
Increasingly, though, I find myself interested in what happens before the behaviour anyone can observe.
I cannot handle a difficult conversation well if I have misread the problem I am trying to address. I cannot make a sound decision if I have become too certain about what the information in front of me means. And I cannot respond to a risk I have stopped noticing.
So I do not think developing judgement is mainly a matter of better decision-making tools, or of encouraging leaders to be more decisive. Much of it depends on leaders becoming more curious about their own perception, and on building the habit of asking questions such as: What am I assuming here? What am I giving most weight to, and why? What might I be missing? What would I need to see to change my mind?
None of those questions guarantees the right decision. Nothing does. What they offer is better conditions in which to make one.
When I wrote about leadership under pressure in early 2025, I described stress as something that could ‘hijack’ a leader’s thinking. I would not put it that way now.
The image of a hijack suggests a rational leader suddenly overtaken by something irrational, and I no longer think that captures what I see. Human perception was never fully objective to begin with. What interests me now is what happens when pressure is added to a perceptual system that is already selective and interpretive, and how easily a capable leader can go on making choices that seem perfectly reasonable without noticing that something important has shifted.
That is what I mean when I say that pressure distorts perception.
It is a simple statement, and I think its implications for how we develop leaders are considerable. Preparing leaders to decide well under pressure remains important, but it may not be enough on its own. We also need to help them notice when pressure might be changing what they can see.
In my experience, that change rarely announces itself. Attention narrows gradually, slowly enough to go unremarked by the person it is happening to, and often well before anyone else would think to call it a problem. Learning to look for that narrowing may be one of the more useful things a leader under sustained pressure can practise.
Questions to use on your own, in supervision or with your team when a decision is under pressure.
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Some decisions stay difficult however much we know, because every option costs something. On choosing well between competing goods, risks and responsibilities.
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Exploring these questions with your leaders?
i3 Leadership works with leaders and leadership teams in care, health, education and financial services, where decisions made under pressure carry consequences for other people.
The thinking behind these articles is set out on The i3 Approach.