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READ TIME: 10 MINUTES | 29 APRIL, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM​

"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.

See you next Wednesday,

Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach