When urgency starts setting the pace.
Julie Goddard, creator of i3 Leadership · 5-minute read · First published 2025, revised 2026
Urgency can feel like information about a situation when it often says more about the pressure surrounding it. This piece looks at the difference between making a decision and making a move, and how leaders can judge the pace a decision needs.
Speed has an interesting place in leadership. We tend to associate it with decisiveness. A leader who can assess a situation quickly, make the call and get things moving looks confident and capable, and in many situations that is exactly what the role requires.
I have worked with plenty of leaders who simply do not have the luxury of unlimited thinking time. A safeguarding concern cannot wait for next week’s meeting. An operational failure may need an immediate response. Sometimes the consequences of not acting are greater than the consequences of acting on incomplete information.
So I am not convinced by the familiar advice that leaders simply need to slow down. Sometimes they need to speed up.
The more useful question, I think, is whether the speed of a decision belongs to the situation or to the pressure surrounding it.
In an earlier article I wrote about how pressure changes what leaders see. Urgency is one of the clearest examples. The feeling that something is urgent is easily read as information about the situation itself, when it may say just as much about the conditions the leader is working in. Under sustained pressure, that distinction becomes harder to hold on to.
A problem lands. Someone wants an answer. There is a risk to manage, a deadline approaching or a senior colleague asking what is being done about it. Attention moves quickly towards action: what are we going to do, who is going to do it, and how quickly can we get this sorted?
All perfectly reasonable questions. The difficulty is that they can arrive before another question has been properly answered, which is what we are dealing with in the first place. The feeling that something is urgent does not necessarily tell us how urgently it needs to be resolved.
I have seen situations where the pressure surrounding an issue created a demand for visible action. Something needed to happen because doing nothing had become increasingly uncomfortable. A meeting was called, a new process introduced, someone moved, a message sent or a decision announced. There was movement, which felt reassuring. Whether there had been progress was a separate question, and often a harder one to answer.
Relief and resolution can feel very similar from the inside.
When I first wrote this article in 2025, I asked a question that I still use: am I making a decision, or am I just making a move?
I think the distinction is worth keeping. A move changes something. A decision involves judgement about what needs to change and why.
The two can, of course, happen together. A leader can understand the situation, judge that immediate intervention is necessary and act within minutes. Acting quickly tells us nothing on its own about the quality of the judgement behind it, and neither does taking longer.
The trouble starts when action itself begins to provide relief from the pressure. Making a move creates a sense that something is being dealt with. It gives people an answer, and it can reassure a board, a team, or sometimes the leader, that the situation is under control. None of that makes the action wrong. It does mean the reason for acting quickly deserves some scrutiny, because relief and resolution can feel very similar from the inside.
There is another reason I am wary of telling leaders simply to slow down. Delay carries risks of its own.
More information does not always produce greater certainty, and another meeting does not necessarily improve the decision. There are situations where the available evidence is sufficient, the consequences are understood and a leader needs to make the call. Waiting can look thoughtful while serving mainly to postpone discomfort.
This is particularly difficult when none of the available options is attractive. The temptation is to keep looking for the piece of information that will make the answer obvious. Sometimes it exists. Often it does not, and the search becomes a way of not deciding.
Sound judgement has to operate in the uncomfortable space between acting before we understand enough and waiting for a certainty that is never going to arrive. That is why I find the distinction between fast and slow decision-making less useful than it first appears. What matters is whether the pace fits the decision in front of us, and who or what has set it.
There is a further complication. Experienced leaders often can make good decisions quickly. Having seen similar situations before, an experienced leader recognises patterns, knows which information matters and which does not, and can move with a confidence that looks like instinct but usually reflects years of accumulated learning.
That expertise matters, and leadership development should not train it out of people by suggesting that every important decision needs a lengthy analytical process.
Experience does raise its own question, though: is this situation sufficiently like the ones I have met before for that experience to be a reliable guide? A familiar-looking problem invites a familiar response. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Sometimes the important detail is the one that makes this situation different, and pressure makes that detail easier to miss.
Experience deserves to be taken seriously. It does not need to be treated as infallible.
I used to describe the answer to the speed trap as a strategic pause. I still think pauses can help, but I am less interested now in prescribing a technique. A ten-second pause will not rescue a decision if the problem has already been misunderstood, and a decision-making framework is only as good as the information fed into it.
What interests me more is whether a leader has created enough space for judgement, however much space that turns out to be. Sometimes it is ten seconds. Sometimes it is a conversation with someone who sees the situation differently, or a request for one more piece of information. Sometimes it is a decision that there is enough information already and that further delay will make things worse.
A few questions help me here. I ask what needs to happen now and what could wait. I ask what becomes possible if I give this more time, and what becomes more difficult if I do. And I ask what I am hoping speed will achieve, because the honest answer to that last question is sometimes ‘make this feeling stop’.
None of these questions removes uncertainty, and nor should it. Their value lies in helping a leader judge what the situation requires, as distinct from what the pressure is demanding.
Decisiveness still matters. Leaders have to make calls, often without all the information they would like and sometimes knowing that the consequences could be significant. A fast decision can be a thoughtful one, and immediate action is sometimes exactly right.
In my experience, noticing that urgency has set the pace rarely arrives as a revelation. More often it is something small: realising I am drafting the announcement before I can explain the problem, or that the meeting I have just called exists mainly to show that something is happening. Moments like these are easy to dismiss, yet each one offers a chance to ask whose pace this is, and to decide deliberately whether to keep it.
Questions to use on your own, in supervision or with your team when a decision is under pressure.
Capable leaders rarely make poor decisions because they have stopped thinking. More often, pressure gradually changes what they can see, while the decision still feels entirely reasonable.
5-minute read · Revised 2026
Some decisions stay difficult however much we know, because every option costs something. On choosing well between competing goods, risks and responsibilities.
5-minute read · Revised 2026
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.