A practical field guide for making better decisions when they matter
We live and work in a world of extraordinary access to information.
Data is abundant. Analysis is increasingly sophisticated. Artificial intelligence can process information and generate options at a speed that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.
Yet none of this removes the need for judgement.
When decisions are consequential, time is compressed and uncertainty increases, leaders still have to establish what really matters, distinguish signal from noise, make a decision and turn it into effective action.
That is the territory explored in my forthcoming book, Executive Decision Acceleration – Enhancing Judgement Under Pressure – A Field Guide.
Why Executive Decision Acceleration?
The central idea is straightforward.
Executive Decision Acceleration is not about making decisions faster for the sake of speed.
Acceleration is the outcome, not the objective.
Better judgement can lead to better decisions.
Better decisions reduce unnecessary rework, hesitation and organisational friction.
That enables better execution and, ultimately, better outcomes, sooner.
The challenge is therefore not simply to accelerate the decision.
It is to improve the quality of judgement that precedes it and the execution that follows.
Lessons from very different environments
The Field Guide draws on more than five decades of experience across aviation, senior leadership, professional representation and management consulting.
Aviation provides many of the examples because it offers an unusually clear environment in which to examine judgement under pressure. Information may be incomplete, circumstances can change rapidly and decisions have consequences.
But the principles extend far beyond the flight deck.
Executives, founders and senior leaders face their own versions of the same fundamental challenge: understanding what is actually happening, establishing what matters, making a sound decision and ensuring that the organisation can execute it.
The book therefore explores information and organisational distortion, time compression, realism, calm, curiosity, people, strategy, modelling and disciplined decision and execution.
It also considers the increasingly important relationship between AI and human judgement.
AI can dramatically enhance our analytical capability.
It does not remove the responsibility to exercise judgement about what we should do.
A field guide designed to be used
This is deliberately not an exhaustive academic treatment of decision-making.
It is a concise, practical field guide designed to be read, challenged, used and returned to when circumstances demand it.
Its purpose can perhaps be summarised most simply as:
Better judgement.
Better decisions.
Better execution.
Better outcomes, sooner.
Pre-Release Review
“Barry approaches business from a practical perspective, drawing on lessons forged in the demanding airline industry and refined through years of applying them as a business consultant.
What I particularly value is his ability to cut through the jargon, fashionable management thinking and unnecessary complexity to get to what actually matters.
His ideas are grounded in experience, explained clearly and, above all, designed to be used.
Having worked with Barry over several years, I recognise his character throughout these pages: thoughtful, pragmatic, questioning and always interested in what works in practice.”
Business Strategy Consultant
Founder of StratNav