First published on 22 September 2026.
The one key skill that shapes your big decisions is rarely taught. Most of what happens to you, at work, in your career, in your business, comes down to decisions: yours or someone else’s. Get better at making them, and almost everything downstream of that gets better too.
Decision making shapes how you do your job, how your career develops, and the bigger choices, such as where you live and what you do next. Even where circumstances are forced on you, how you respond is still a decision. That runs from the most basic instinct, fight or flight, to the complex judgement behind a business startup, a takeover or a career move.
And yet it’s barely taught. Schools and universities teach subjects. Almost none teach how to decide.
I help close that gap. From October 2019 I was teaching strategy using pre-mortem-style critical thinking techniques, before I had a name for them. In March 2020 I began formal training in Red Team Thinking®, a structured approach to decision making for leaders, and have worked in it for over six years since. I use it one to one as a coaching practice, in facilitated sessions with teams, or to examine a plan or a decision before it is made, so you, your team or your business can decide faster and more objectively, without getting lost in the options.
The first step is always the same: see the problem clearly before deciding what to do about it. Important decisions are rarely short of information. The difficulty is working out what matters, what is missing and which assumptions are quietly shaping the available options.
A consultant sells you their answer. I don’t bring the experience of your problem, you do. I bring the method for analysing it, so you reach a better answer of your own, and reach it faster.
Think back on your career and the decisions that turned out badly. You can’t undo them now. But in five years, looking back on the decisions you’re making today, do you want the same story, or do you want to know they were the best you could make with the knowledge you had at the time?
You are not alone in finding this hard. Even company directors, the people making the decisions that shape where you work, say it is getting harder in an increasingly complex world. A 2022–23 survey by the Institute of Directors found that almost half of directors, 47%, named improving board analysis and decision-making, including the use of data analytics, as a key focus for the next three to five years (source). Protiviti’s global board governance research makes a similar point: boards need to ask the right questions (source).
This is the same discipline used by boards, public sector bodies and military organisations worldwide, applied to a real decision, not one made on instinct or under pressure to be seen to decide quickly.
I have delivered Red Team Thinking® facilitation in the UK, Romania, India and Malta.
Get in touch now: Contact me
Get in touch now: Contact me