Decisions are the job
Decisions are hardest when clarity is missing or capacity is low. Clarity is rare. Decisions still need to be made.
A large part of leadership is being the one who makes the big calls. As you become more senior, you may delegate more and decide less personally, but the decisions you do make carry more weight. The stakes get higher, the consequences more significant and accountability ultimately sits with the boss.
That’s why Principals, Headteachers, managers and CEOs get paid more. Not because they are working harder minute by minute, but because schools and organisations need people prepared to cut through ambiguity and choose a direction. When things are unclear, people look up the hierarchy for someone to make the call.
The word decision comes from the Latin decidere, meaning to cut off. To decide is therefore to remove alternatives. To close paths and commit. That is why decisions feel heavy. You are not just choosing one option, you are actively rejecting others, and that can be uncomfortable.
Whilst often used interchangeably, there is a useful distinction between choosing and deciding. Choosing is the act of selecting one option from those available, while deciding involves reaching a final conclusion after consideration and evaluation. Decisions tend to be less reversible than choices. You might choose salted caramel ice cream, but you decide to change jobs.
As heavy as decisions can be, there is something freeing in deciding too. Endless options create noise, but decisions create focus. Progress can really happen once options are cut away and a direction is chosen.
For a long time, I assumed that the more decisions you make, the better you become at deciding. Like building a decision muscle. To a point, that is true. Judgement improves with experience. Patterns emerge. Day-to-day decisions become quicker and easier as you recognise what situations tend to lead where. I have reflected before on how often, in my first year as a senior leader, I would pop in to ask my headteacher a question and be met with, “What do you think?”. Being pushed to answer repeatedly forced me to decide, and my confidence in decision-making did grow quickly. It developed me and reduced the number of decisions my boss had to carry.
But that only holds up to a certain point.
As schools move towards the end of term, workload increases as time runs out and extras mount. Safeguarding work also tends to stack up as fatigue, pressure, disrupted routines and looming holidays expose vulnerabilities and prompt more disclosures or behaviours that signal distress. Pressure rises. Sleep drops. You spend those final weeks making more high-stakes calls than usual. This applies across a school, from classroom teachers through to the Head.
By the evening, the simplest decisions become strangely hard.
After a heavy week like that, I found myself staring at a menu with no idea what to order. No preference. No instinct. Completely blank. Tired, hungry and being asked to hurry up, I eventually ordered the same thing I always order.
Decision fatigue is not about weakness or poor organisation. It is about finite cognitive bandwidth. The same cognitive load we readily consider when thinking about student learning applies here too. When that bandwidth is depleted, decisions slow, judgement deteriorates and, sometimes, the ability to choose stops altogether.
Research on decision-making under cognitive load points to two common failure patterns: fatigue and paralysis.
Fatigue is when energy is low and decisions still happen, but quality drops. People default, rush and choose what is easiest, quickest or most familiar rather than what is optimal.
Paralysis is when decisions are delayed or avoided altogether. This often shows up as over-analysis, excessive information-seeking or waiting for one more piece of data that never materially changes the decision.
They can look different, but they often come from the same place: depleted capacity. In leadership, both are risky because neither is deliberate and both undermine effectiveness. Reducing avoidable cognitive load is why leaders such as Obama, Jobs and Zuckerberg simplified routine decisions like what to wear each day.
Fatigue does not explain everything, though.
Emotional load plays a significant role. Safeguarding, conflict and responsibility draw heavily on emotional regulation, not just cognition. Two leaders can make the same number of decisions, but emotionally weighted ones drain capacity far faster.
Tolerance for uncertainty matters too. Some paralysis is driven less by tiredness and more by discomfort with ambiguity. When clarity is low and stakes are high, hesitation can reflect low tolerance for uncertainty rather than depleted energy.
Accountability pressure also shapes behaviour. When consequences are personal, visible or reputational, leaders may delay or avoid decisions even when cognitively fresh. This is not indecision so much as risk management.
The behaviours can look the same. The causes are not.
Recognising which state you are in - fatigue, emotional overload, uncertainty aversion or accountability pressure - is critical. Without that awareness, leaders risk treating the wrong problem or defaulting to inaction when deliberate choice is required.
This is where decision frameworks and mental models become useful.
This idea of judgement under pressure is echoed in a recent Forbes piece on discernment by Vibhas Ratanjee, drawing on the work of decision scientist Gary Klein. The argument is that modern leaders are not short of decisions, they are short of discernment. We reward speed, polish and confidence, often mistaking decisiveness for clarity, while skipping the harder discipline of actually seeing what matters.
Klein’s work on naturalistic decision-making shows that experienced leaders rarely compare options neatly. Instead, they recognise patterns, mentally simulate likely outcomes and move. It can look like intuition, but it is judgement shaped by experience, reflection and consequence. Crucially, not all experience qualifies. Repetition without reflection does not build discernment. It reinforces habit.
That matters, because many leadership environments test performance more than judgement. In-tray exercises, interviews and real-world crises are not about finding the right answer, but about whether you can notice what is relevant, question surface certainty and commit when clarity is partial.
Discernment, in that sense, is not about knowing more. It is about seeing better. And that is what separates fast decisions from wise ones when pressure is high and the cost of being wrong is real.
Many leadership decisions are made under uncertainty. Waiting for clarity is tempting, but clarity rarely arrives. Research on decision paralysis shows that uncertainty elsewhere can create inaction here. Leaders stall not because they lack judgement, but because they want certainty that does not exist.
Strong leaders decide anyway.
Steven Bartlett recently referenced this on Diary of a CEO while interviewing Desmond O’Neill, noting that Obama authorised the Bin Laden raid with roughly 50 percent confidence that Bin Laden was in the building. It reflects how senior decisions are made under uncertainty, where waiting carries its own risk.
O’Neill notes that there is rarely a provably right decision in advance. There is only a decision made with the information available at the time.
That distinction matters. Being right is confirmation whereas being wrong is feedback. Neither defines the quality of the leader. What matters is making the decision and then owning it.
Once you decide, you have to own it. Fully. No hedging. No hiding behind the process. No rewriting the story after the fact. Ownership builds trust even when outcomes disappoint.
Daniel Kahneman’s work on judgement and decision-making shows how stress, cognitive load and noise distort thinking, pushing people towards reactive, surface-level responses rather than considered judgement. Calm matters because it enables pattern recognition rather than panic. It helps separate signal from noise and recognise what a situation is most like, rather than reacting to the loudest detail.
Calm also makes Charlie Munger’s inversion thinking possible. Instead of asking what would make this perfect, ask what would clearly make it worse and rule those paths out first. When capacity is low, that alone can materially improve decision quality.
Desmond O’Neill makes a similar point when speaking with Steven Bartlett. In medicine, decisions are rarely made with certainty. They are made by weighing probabilities, risks and consequences, knowing that delay is itself a decision. Leadership operates in the same way.
Trump is a useful counter-example. Performative certainty without ownership is the opposite of responsible decision-making under uncertainty.
The standard, then, is not about being right in advance but about being responsible in the moment and then owning your decisions after the fact, regardless of them being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
Make the call.
Be clear about why.
Own what follows.
Review it honestly.
Adjust without self-protection as the motive.
Two elements often overlooked are timing and narrative. When to decide matters as much as what you decide. Some decisions benefit from pause, consultation and data gathering. Others deteriorate if they wait. Part of leadership judgement is knowing the difference.
Decisions also do not land in a vacuum. I have seen sound decisions in schools fail to gain traction not because they were wrong, but because the rationale was unclear, the framing was weak or the story was left for others to write. Leaders do not just make decisions. They decide when to act and how those decisions are understood. That work often determines whether a decision strengthens trust or quietly undermines it.