Deciding At The Speed Of The Shock
Compression made it visible and very uncomfortable in less than an hour.
Deciding At The Speed Of The Shock
The announcement lands in the evening.
The television is still on. Your phone is lighting up on the arm of the chair, and by the time you have finished watching, the messages have started. Your people need to hear from you before they log on in the morning, and what you say will shape how your people and several hundred households spend the next week. You do not yet know what the new situation means for the business. Nobody does. The people you would usually decide with are at home or elsewhere, on their own screens, reading the same headlines you are.
And underneath the message you are drafting sits a question your team has never had to answer out loud: who would decide if it were you who could not be reached tonight.
Most leaders have lived a version of that evening more than once, and what it taught has not changed: the shock sets the pace, and the only thing still in the team's hands is the quality of its judgement.
Here is a common version, one the high-consequence leader often lives in.
The market wants a statement. The deadline is the opening of trading, and what goes out cannot be taken back. The person your whole decision culture runs through is somewhere with no signal. The people who can be found, the chair, one or two of the non-executives, a few of the executive team, have to decide something irreversible, at speed, in a culture that has never once practised deciding without its leader.
That is the moment this article is about.
The lens: compressed judgement
The conditions and contexts this happens in continue to grow. A market or regulator wanting a response before the open. A rule change or lockdown announced in the evening. A conflict breaking out, or a terrorist attack, somewhere the business depends on. A strait or a supply chain closing. An export rule changing overnight. A new capability launching that rewrites the risks and the opportunities in less than a week. A public relations issue with the business or one of its leaders. Every one of these arrives at a pace the processes were not normally built for, and the pace they require amplifies the pressure.
The lens is compressed judgement, in a context of uncertainty. Compression removes the option of resolving the uncertainty before you decide. There is no version of either evening where the facts arrive first. You must decide inside the uncertainty. Even if you decide to do nothing, or do not consciously decide anything, that is also a decision the market, your people and stakeholders will read into and respond to.
In the messy reality of a shock, a team rarely rises to the occasion. It falls to its level of preparation, practice, and the way it has learned to behave under pressure.
What the shock feels like
The shock is felt viscerally, before any thought about it. A tightening. A sharp intake of breath, held longer than usual. An initial move inward, downward and back. Then, quickly, a look up and out, and a strong pull to move forward and up into action. The heartbeat and the breath quicken.
The skilled do not stop that from happening. They keep it in control: clear, focused, allowing the body to do what the body and the mind need, without letting it race away into panic, or steal clarity, or waste energy on distractions. That control is a capacity, and it is developable, and not enough leaders and leadership teams have rehearsed it together.
What the compression reveals
When the pressure is on and the compression is real, I have seen many teams look to their leader to make the call. They want speed, and they want certainty, in exactly the moment certainty does not exist. If the leader is absent, or goes quiet, another strong voice takes the initiative. Sometimes that voice is the right one. Often it is simply the loudest. Either way, the decision that follows is not always the best one available, because the culture never decided in advance who decides, or how, when the usual decider cannot.
I have been in many rooms like that, and been part of a leadership culture that ran through one person, on the evening that person could not be reached. The people who could be found responded as they judged best, and it was neither quick, easy nor smooth. What the evening revealed was not a shortage of good people. It was the shape of how we had learned to decide: one node, with everyone else relying on it to carry the moment, and I had been one of the people relying on it. At normal speed, none of us had acknowledged that. Compression made it visible and very uncomfortable in less than an hour.
Sometimes a situation is so complex and emergent that no clear longer term plan can be formulated. In certain moments you need a decision, good enough for now, to implement, a decision that buys you more time for the next step, or gives you time to see how the first move plays out. Sense what is actually happening, decide, respond, and reassess before the next move. You cannot unsay things to a stock or bond market or your people, so the consequences of the first move are high. But you can normally make more moves later, and that is precisely why you have to hold the responsibility and consequences for each one rather than wait for a certainty that is not coming.
The people for whom this is the job
There is a world where compressed collective decisions are not the exception but the daily reality: defence, and the operators around it. Their discipline is worth learning from, and it is more than the drills.
They know, in advance, who decides when the usual decision maker is unavailable, or worse. The next person steps up according to a known protocol, because they have to, and because they have practised the version where the person is gone. They know the objective and the intent, not just the plan, so the next decision maker can move in the right direction without asking. And afterwards, they reconstruct honestly for whoever was absent, as routine, not reproach, learning from the after action review.
Executive teams tend to have the plan and none of the other elements. Which leaves the question: who decides when there is no time to convene everyone who should? And who decides, who decides?
The weight that does not delegate
The more sophisticated the leaders, the more they can hold and the more they can see, and the wiser the judgement can be. That is why the work of developing judgement matters most before the moment, not during it. But at the point of the shock, sophistication brings equanimity to the weight rather than removing it. There is no certainty to rest upon. It sits on your shoulders and your heart, and it demands that you bring your clearest thoughts to bear under the pressure, with the people who happen to be present, in the time you happen to have. The time to develop is before that moment arrives.
A leadership reality
In the messy reality of a shock, a team rarely rises to the occasion. It falls to its level of preparation, practice, and the way it has learned to behave under pressure.
If deciding at this pace, under this pressure, is new to your team, do not expect it to go well. As a leader, and as a leadership team, it is your responsibility to be able to do this, for yourselves, for your people, and for everyone your decisions reach. There is no practice in this article, because the practice belongs to the piece that opened this thread: the plan tells you what your team intends to do, and only the moment tells you how it decides. This is the moment. The good practices you rehearsed before it arrived either hold now, or were never there to draw upon.
One question worth carrying
If the shock arrived right now, who would actually be on the call in time, and how would you decide?
If that feels easy, or not quite real, look back across your career and count how many times it has already occurred, and remember how it felt in the moment. Most of us can count many more than one. Fewer can say it would be any easier next time.
It is a wise leadership move to know, before the shock, who decides when the usual decision maker cannot, because the moment will not wait for you to work it out.
May you always find wise judgement when certainty is unfindable.