The anatomy of good decisions
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"Lads, that's the job. Let's talk options. Thoughts?"
I was observing from the back of the room. The officer who said it had presented his commander's intent, the what and the why and then he did something most leaders rarely do.
He got out of his own way.
What followed was one of the most purposeful conversations I've witnessed in any organisation. Articulate disagreement. Humour. References to similar situations. Genuine concern for safety, practicality, and getting the mission done.
Every person in that room knew they were contributing something real. And every person in that room knew that when the conversation ended, their boss would make the call and they would be good for it.
No one was defending anything. They were deciding.
Contrast that with a leadership meeting I've sat in recently and I've sat in more than a few.
Slides prepared, positions rehearsed, leaders arriving not to think together but to protect what they've already concluded. The agenda nominally says "discussion." What happens is a sequence of presentations, each one a careful defence of a decision already made.
This is unnamed trap in most organisations.
It isn't that people want to make bad decisions. It's that they spend most of their energy justifying the ones they've already made rather than building the conditions for better ones.
And the cost is enormous in time, trust and in the compounding effect of marginal calls that never got properly stress tested.
And here's the thing that frustrates CEOs: You can't solve a cultural problem with a personal one.
If you're the only person in your organisation who knows how to make a good decision, you've built a bottleneck, not a business.
This essay is about the anatomy of a good decision. Not the right decision (I'll come back to that distinction), a good decision.
One that can be made at any level of an organisation, taught to anyone willing to learn it, and compounded over time into something that looks, from the outside, like outstanding leadership.
Good decisions and right decisions are not the same thing
I spoke recently with Nick Astwick, who's spent nearly a decade as CEO of Southern Cross Health Society in New Zealand, one of the country's most important health institutions.
The difference between good decisions and right decisions, Nick told me, is one of the most important things he's learned in leadership.
A right decision is what you know in hindsight. A good decision is the best one available with the information you have right now. The more good decisions you make consistently, the more of them turn out to be right in the fullness of time.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Most leaders and most organisations are trying to make the right decision. So, they wait. They gather more information. They build the case. They prepare the defence. And in doing so, they confuse thoroughness with quality, and delay with diligence.
In my experience, the cultures that win are not the ones with the best information. They're the ones that make the best decisions with the information they have.
Decisiveness compounds. Hesitation compounds too, just in the other direction.
Nick puts it plainly: a culture that makes consistently good decisions wins out. Full stop.
So, what does a good decision actually look like? After years of watching leaders at every level, from that room of soldiers to boardrooms navigating real crises and being the CEO who people looked to for the decision, I've come to believe there's a recognisable anatomy to good decisions.
Five ingredients. Each one learnable. Each one teachable.
The Decision Anatomy
1. Context before content
Before you evaluate a single option, you need to know the filter. What does this organisation care about? What's the purpose here? What are we trying to protect or create? The soldiers in that room didn't start with options. Their officer started with intent. Context isn't a preamble; it's the decision-making substrate. Without it, every call starts from scratch, and you're relying on whoever shouts loudest rather than what actually matters.
For your team: The next time you ask people to weigh in on a decision, give them the context first, not the options. Tell them what winning looks like, and what you're trying to protect. Watch how the quality of the conversation changes.
2. Imperfect information is the default, not the exception
You will never have complete information. Not as a CEO, not as a frontline leader, not as anyone making a consequential call. The question is never 'do I have enough?' It's 'am I making the best decision available with what I have right now?' This reframes the act of deciding from a completion problem to a judgement call. And judgement, unlike information, is something you can develop.
For your team: When someone brings you a half-formed decision and says they need more information before they can proceed, ask them: What's the cost of waiting? Often the cost of delay exceeds the risk of deciding with what's available. Teach them to name that trade-off explicitly.
3. Diversity before alignment
Nick is direct about this: You don't want agreement in a decision-making room. You want disagreement, the kind that’s articulate and directed at the problem. Draw out every concern, every alternative reading, every uncomfortable implication. Ferocious disagreement in service of a good decision is not disloyalty. It's the job. The trap is calling for alignment too early, which produces consensus theatre rather than genuine commitment.
For your team: Make it safe to disagree and make it expected. If your people are arriving with polished positions rather than live thinking, the room isn't psychologically safe enough for real decision-making. Ask the person most likely to disagree to speak first.
4. Articulable reasoning
A good decision can be explained. Not justified, explained. There's a difference. Justification is defensive. Explanation is clear. Nick's test: can you stand in front of your people and say, plainly, this is why we made this decision? If the reasoning must be dressed up or softened before it can be shared, the decision probably isn't ready. The ability to articulate a decision simply is both a test of the decision's quality and the foundation for everyone else to carry it forward.
For your team: Ask them to explain a recent decision in two sentences. Not present it — explain it. If they can't, the decision needs more work, not more slides.
5. Close the loop (Out loud)
A decision isn't made until every person in the room has committed to it audibly. Not enthusiastically, audibly. There's a specific moment in good decision-making conversations where the disagreement has been heard, the call has been made, and every person says, in effect: I may not fully agree, but I'm on the train. That loop must be closed explicitly. Because the thing that derails decisions downstream is almost always the person who never quite said yes, and so never felt bound.
For your team: At the end of any significant decision, go around the room. Not to reopen the debate, to close it. Ask each person directly: Are you on the train? It takes two minutes and it saves months.
The compounding effect
Here's what Nick understood that took me longer to learn: A series of good decisions compounds into the right outcome. Not every time. But most of the time, and reliably enough to build on.
COVID tested that at Southern Cross. The private health system in New Zealand closed for six weeks. Nick and his team made a series of calls on remote working, on safely reopening services, on returning $50 million to members who couldn't access care they'd paid for.
Not all of those decisions were right in hindsight. But they were good decisions, made with the information available, grounded in context, tested by disagreement and carried cleanly through the organisation.
That's what the anatomy produces. Not perfection. Momentum.
And the most important thing about momentum is this: it doesn't come from the CEO alone.
The leaders who build genuinely decisive organisations are the ones who stop treating decision-making as a personal capability and start treating it as a cultural one.
They teach the anatomy.
They model it publicly.
They create rooms where it can happen at every level.
Because the bottleneck isn't the quality of the CEO's decisions.
It's the number of people in the organisation who know how to make one.
My question for you this week: How many people in your organisation know how to make a good decision without you in the room?
PS If this essay helped, Episode 193 (CEO Nick Astwick on reclaiming New Zealand’s lost healthspan) from my podcast is worthy of your time.
Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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