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Life Acumen at Work. Podcast.

Decisiveness rarely looks dangerous in the moment

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One of the strange things about senior leadership is that decisiveness rarely looks dangerous in the moment. But hesitation does. If you are the CEO, the founder, the business head, the person everyone is waiting for, there's enormous pressure to make the call. Everyone wants clarity. The market is moving. So are your competitors. Technology is moving even faster. Your board wants progress. Your team wants direction. And you probably didn't get this far by taking three months over every decision. So, speed becomes part of the leadership identity. We admire leaders who take action, who keep things moving, who clear the way, who say, okay, this is what we will do. And most of the time, that's a strength. But I've been wondering about the other side of it. What happens when speed stops being a choice and becomes the goal? When every pause feels like a waste of time. When every different view feels like pushback, when reflection feels like a luxury because another decision is waiting. And most importantly, what happens when we get very good at moving fast, but stop noticing when we are headed the wrong way? That's what I want to explore today. Not whether we should move fast or slow, but asking ourselves, do we still know when speed helps and when it hurts? Welcome to Life Acumen at Work. This episode is about the hidden cost of speed. And I want to start by making one thing clear. This is not an argument for slow decision making. In fact, some research suggests almost the opposite. McKinsey looked at decision making across more than a thousand managers and found something interesting. Organizations that made decisions quickly were also significantly more likely to report making high-quality decisions. So, speed and quality are not necessarily enemies. The strongest organizations often manage to achieve both. What I find more revealing though is the distinction underneath that finding. Not all decisions deserve the same process. A reversible decision where you can experiment, learn, and change course benefits enormously from speed. On the other hand, a major strategic bet, one involving reputation, significant capital, major organizational consequences, or something difficult to undo, needs more debate, challenge, and careful judgment. And I think that's where organizations sometimes get into trouble. They develop one speed, everything becomes urgent. And when everything feels urgent, we lose the ability to choose what truly matters.

The Seduction of Decisiveness

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If you really think about it, the problem isn't speed itself, it's the loss of choice about speed. There's also a personal side to decisiveness, the seduction of decisiveness. As executives become more senior, people increasingly look to them to resolve ambiguity. Think about what happens in a difficult meeting. Ten people are debating an issue. They see it differently. They don't have all the facts. The discussion goes in circles. Then the senior leader steps in. Okay, here's what we will do. You can almost feel the room relax. And that feeling is powerful. Decisiveness reduces anxiety. It creates motion. It restores a sense of control. But here's what makes this complicated. Sometimes we act quickly because the situation requires speed. And sometimes we act fast because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. That's different. We may be easing our own discomfort, not solving the real problem. And I suspect this distinction is harder to see from inside the decision than it appears from outside. Experienced leaders may do this more often than we admit. Because uncertainty doesn't sound very decisive. I'm not sure yet, I want to hear another view. Let's live with this question for 24 hours. Those lines can sound less like leadership than let's do it. Especially in cultures that price action. And over time, decisiveness can shift from something useful to something leaders feel they must prove. That's when velocity starts becoming dangerous. Because the organization learns something from us. It learns whether changing your mind is interpreted as learning or weakness. It learns whether the purpose of a meeting is to discover something or merely to get a decision. And perhaps that's worth sitting with for a moment. People don't only watch the decisions senior leaders make, they watch what kind of thinking appears to be rewarded on the way to those decisions. Jeff Bezos made a useful distinction at Amazon many years ago. He compared decisions to doors. Some are two-way doors. If you are wrong, you can turn back. Make those decisions quickly. Try, learn, and adjust. Others are one-way doors. They are harder to undo and carry bigger consequences. And Bezos explicitly argued that those decisions deserve a slower, more deliberate process. I've always thought that the most useful part of that idea isn't the door metaphor itself. It's the fact that one of the world's most famous speed-oriented organizations was saying, don't use the same decision process for everything. That is surprisingly easy to forget. Imagine two decisions landing on an executive team's table. One is whether to test a new pricing message with 5% of customers. The other is whether to discontinue a long-stablished product line that remains profitable but is absorbing investment and management attention. If both go through the same cultural machinery of move fast, don't overthink it. Something has gone wrong. And the reverse is also true. If the pricing experiment goes through three committees because that's how all decisions are handled, something has also gone wrong. The mistake we often make is to frame this as a choice between decisiveness and deliberation. I don't think it is. The opposite of moving fast is not moving slowly. It is being able to choose the appropriate speed. For me, that's one of the central leadership capabilities here. Not velocity, but range. Can the organization sprint when learning is cheap? Can it pause when consequences are difficult to reverse? And can it move between those modes without reading the change of tempo as inconsistency?

What Speed Does to Dissent

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There is another hidden cost. What speed does to dissent. When speed becomes a virtue, disagreement can look like obstruction. No one needs to say we don't want dissent here. The message is usually more subtle. Someone raises a concern and the unspoken questions begin. Why make this harder? Why not focus on a solution? Haven't we talked enough? Are they with us or not? Sometimes they are really slowing things down. We've all seen that. But sometimes, what sounds like pushback is useful information. Deloitte's work on inclusive leadership found that teams rating their leaders as more inclusive also reported stronger decision quality and collaboration. In one analysis involving 105 leaders and around 600 raters, inclusive leadership was associated with a 20% improvement in perceived decision-making quality and around 30% increase in collaboration. What struck me about that research is that inclusion is not just a question of fairness, it is also about information. Whose information gets heard? Whose concern survives the rush? Who gets to challenge the main story? Senior teams know a lot, but not all of it gets said. And that's the part that's easy to miss. The faster the room moves, the easier it is to miss an inconvenient signal. Someone who says, I'm not convinced, may not be slowing things down. They may be saving you months of extra work. They may know something others don't. Or they may be wrong. But you won't know until they speak. There's another way of looking at dissent then. Instead of seeing it only as friction in the decision process, we might sometimes see it as information trying to enter the system. And that raises a very practical leadership question. When you walk into an important meeting, does your presence increase the amount of independent thinking in the room or reduce it? Because the most senior person speaking first can accelerate a meeting dramatically, but it can also stop the

Fast Execution, Slow Learning

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thinking. And that brings me to what I think is the deepest hidden cost fast execution, slow learning. An organization can be moving incredibly fast and learning incredibly slowly. These two things are easy to confuse. Chris Argyris, the Harvard scholar, made a distinction decades ago between what became known as single loop and double loop learning. In simple terms, single loop learning says we didn't achieve the result. What do we need to change to achieve it? Double loop learning goes deeper. It asks, why are we pursuing this result in the first place? What assumptions produce the goal? What if one of those assumptions is wrong? Argyris argued that organizations can become very effective at correcting errors while leaving the underlying beliefs and policies untouched. I am reminded of how often this happens in organizations after something underperforms. We launch something, it underperforms, immediately there's a task force. New actions, new targets, new dashboards, new deadlines, and everybody is moving again. Which creates the comforting impression of learning. But maybe we are just getting better at doing something we never questioned. We are learning how to do the same thing better, not whether it's still the right thing to do. That's the difference. Activity produces feedback. Reflection turns feedback into learning. A lot of people miss that distinction because activity is visible. Reflections usually isn't. And organizations that are addicted to motion often complete the first step and skip the second. They finish the quarter and immediately begin the next quarter. They complete the integration and move into the next restructuring. They get through the crisis and immediately return to execution. There is rarely a dramatic moment when somebody says, By the way, what have we actually learned about ourselves? And perhaps that's why reflection feels surprisingly unusual, even at the top. BCG's work with CEOs found that many leaders reported spending roughly 5 to 15% of their time reflecting, while saying they would prefer something closer to 15 to 20%. I don't think the important point is the exact percentage. The more interesting thing is that accomplished people with enormous control over organizational resources still describe reflection as something they struggle to protect. Because urgency consumes whatever space is available. There's always something more pressing than thinking until the cost of not thinking becomes immediate. There's another reason reflection matters. We don't always learn correctly from outcomes. Annie Duke makes this point beautifully in Thinking in Bets. She talks about what she calls resulting, our tendency to judge the quality of a decision by the quality of its outcome. Good result, good decision. Bad result, bad decision. Except, life doesn't work like that. Particularly at senior levels. You can make an excellent strategic decision and encounter a geopolitical shock six months later. You can make a mediocre decision and be rescued by a buoyant market. You can hire someone for poor reasons who turns out brilliantly. You can reject someone for excellent reasons who later becomes enormously successful elsewhere. Decision quality and outcome quality are connected, but they are not identical. And speed can make this problem worse because organizations rush to create narratives. We acted boldly and it worked. So boldness becomes the lesson. Or we waited and we missed the opportunity. So speed becomes the lesson. Maybe, but maybe the result contained more luck than we are comfortable acknowledging. And here is what makes success particularly complicated. Failure usually forces some kind of review. Success rarely does. Success says, do it again. So after a good result, ask, how much came from good judgment and how much was luck? That question protects learning from success. And for me, the broader point is that learning isn't just about correcting what failed. Sometimes the harder task is examining what succeeded. There's a corporate example from India that adds an important nuance. When Tata Motors acquired JLR from Ford in 2008, the decision itself was bold. Tata paid about $2.3 billion for the businesses in a transaction completed just as the global financial environment was becoming extraordinarily difficult. But what is interesting for our purposes is what happened after the decisive act. A later case analysis of the acquisition argued that Tata resisted the common temptation to extract synergies as quickly as possible. Instead, it continued investing in JLR's core capabilities and took a longer-term approach, with the researchers explicitly identifying patience as one ingredient in the eventual success of the acquisition. Now, JLR's story has continued to evolve and like any large acquisition, it has had difficult periods. But the leadership lesson is still useful. You can move quickly on conviction and patiently on integration. Those are not contradictory behaviors. They may actually be signs of better judgment. The right pace can change after the decision.

Good leaders know when to shift gears

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Good leaders know when to shift gears. They can act decisively, then give integration capability and trust some time to grow. Microsoft gives us another version of the same idea. Such an idea is widely associated with shifting Microsoft's culture away from what the company itself has described as a know-it-all environment toward more of a learn-it-all growth mindset. That matters because learning starts when we admit we may not have the full answer. But an even more interesting moment came in 2024. As Microsoft intensified its cybersecurity efforts, Nadila told employees that security was to take priority when it conflicted with other goals. And the company explicitly acknowledged that this could sometimes mean delaying new features. I find that fascinating. Because it doesn't say speed is unimportant. Microsoft competes in markets where speed matters enormously. What it says is speed does not permanently occupy the top position in the hierarchy of values. Sometimes trust comes first. Sometimes safety comes first. Sometimes reputation comes first. Sometimes learning comes first. And sometimes inclusion comes first. The key perhaps is not deciding once and for all whether your organization is fast. It's retaining the judgment to know what needs to come first and when. So let's separate three kinds of speed. First, execution speed. Once you know what to do, how fast can we act? Second, decision speed. How fast can we make the call? Third, learning speed. How fast can we see we are wrong and change our view? The first two are easy to see. Learning speed is harder to spot. So an organization can look fast but adapt slowly. Decisions are quick, launches are quick, reviews lead to quick action, but no one changes their mind. That's speed. It isn't always agility. And in the end, learning speed may matter more than decision speed. In a complex world, deciding three weeks earlier may not win. Spotting the mistake six months earlier might.

Yoga is skill in action

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There's a line in the Bhagavad Gita that is often translated as "Yoga is skill in action". I want to be careful with that because ancient spiritual texts deserve better than being reduced to management slogans. In its context, the passage is connected with equanimity and wisdom in action, not with becoming more productive or simply getting more things done. But there is something in that phrase I find useful here: skill in action. Not the worship of action itself. The deeper question isn't simply whether I act, it's whether the quality of mind accompanying the action allows me to see clearly. And perhaps that's the real question underneath this whole conversation. Not how quickly am I moving, but what am I able to see while I am moving? Perhaps that's the difference between motion and judgment. So, what do you actually do with all of this? I don't think the answer is to block two hours in everyone's diary labeled reflection. That's probably how reflection becomes another meeting. Instead, over the next day or two, notice one meaningful decision already moving through your organization. Not a hypothetical decision, something real. It could be an investment, a senior hire, a restructuring, or a product or technology decision. Then ask yourself four questions. First, how reversible is this really? If we are wrong, can we recover easily? If yes, we may be spending too much time trying to be certain. Move, learn, and adjust. But if it's hard to undo, one more serious conversation is worth it. Second, what are we not discussing because we are trying to maintain momentum? That's a different question from does anyone disagree? People know how to remain silent when the CEO asks if anyone disagrees. Instead, ask what hasn't been discussed. You may get a different answer. Third, whose information have I interpreted as a challenge? Not their attitude, but whose information that subtle shift matters. And finally, what evidence would genuinely cause me to change my mind? If nothing would change your mind, this may not be a decision. It may be a belief you're protecting. There's one other small experiment worth trying. In the next consequential meeting, if you are the most senior person in the room, speak later. Not dramatically. You don't need to announce that you are practicing inclusive decision making. Just listen. Let the views form before yours becomes the gravitational center of the room. It might cost you 10 minutes, but it could save you 10 months. When I started thinking about the subject, I assumed the central tension was speed versus reflection. I'm not sure that's quite right anymore. The more I think about it, the tension seems to be between speed as a capability and speed as an identity. The best leaders I have seen can move very fast. They can make bold decisions, but they don't move at the same speed on everything. They know when to change gears. They know when more analysis is just fear. And when acting fast is just impatience. They can act without having all the answers, but they can also remain with uncertainty when the quality of the decision demands it. They can commit fully and change their mind when the facts change. They know disagreement is not always disloyal. A pause is not always indecision. A good result does not always mean a good decision. And fixing things is not the same as learning. Perhaps that's the hidden cost of speed. Not that we make more mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable. The bigger danger is that constant motion drowns out what matters. The doubt behind the agreement, the assumption behind the strategy, the lesson behind the result, the person who knows something we don't, or our own quiet feeling that we should look again. So, maybe the challenge for leadership isn't to make the organization move faster. And it certainly isn't to make it move slower. Maybe the real challenge is knowing when to speed up and when to slow down. Move fast when it's easy to test and learn. But take your time when the stakes are high. Make the call, but stay open to changing it. And recognize that sometimes the most valuable thing a leader can create is not momentum, but enough space for judgment to catch up with it. So here's the question I will leave you with. Where has speed become a habit instead of a choice? And what might you notice if you paused before speeding up? Thank you for joining me on Life Acumen at Work. If this episode gave you a question worth carrying into your next decision or your next leadership conversation, take it with you. And if you enjoy these reflections on leadership work and the choices that shape us, please follow LifeAcumen at work and join me for the next conversation. Until then, lead well and leave yourself enough space to notice what speed might otherwise make you miss. Life Acumen at Work.