I’ve been a lifelong aviation enthusiast, and I’ve always enjoyed listening to pilots talk about flying, particularly military pilots.
One thing that’s always struck me is how differently test pilots speak compared to combat pilots.
There’s overlap, of course. Some people do both. But the very best test pilots tend to sound like engineers. They talk about envelopes, tolerances, and failure modes. They’re absorbed in understanding what a machine will and won’t tolerate.
Combat pilots, by contrast, tend to sound unapologetically competitive. Speed. Decisiveness. Dominance. In the right conditions, that mindset is devastatingly effective.
What matters is that they’re optimised for different moments: Different market conditions and strategic environments reward different decision-making styles.
That contrast turns out to be surprisingly useful when thinking about leadership and decision-making.
Decisions have phases, not fixed styles
This doesn’t mean styles don’t matter — it means their usefulness changes over the life of a decision.
Most organisations talk about decision-making as if it were a single skill, but decades of research on sense-making and bounded rationality suggest otherwise. In practice, any serious decision passes through distinct phases, and different people are naturally stronger in different parts of that cycle.
A simple way to think about it is this:
- Sense-making – What is actually going on here?
- Constraint management – What can we afford, sustain, or absorb?
- Commitment – What are we doing, now, in public, with consequences?
The mistake organisations make is assuming one type of thinker should dominate all three.
Different leaders are comfortable in different phases
Some leaders are at their best in the early phases.
They decompose problems. They stabilise variance. They think in flows, limits, buffers, and second-order effects. They are comfortable delaying commitment while reducing uncertainty.
These people are often brilliant at:
- cash control
- forecasting
- capacity management
- risk containment
- operational coherence
They protect the system.
Other leaders come alive at the moment of commitment.
They compress complexity, tolerate incomplete information, and convert ambiguity into direction. They are sensitive to timing, rivals, and narrative alignment. They understand that some uncertainty cannot be eliminated and must simply be carried.
These people are often brilliant at:
- competitive strategy
- coordination under pressure
- decisive action
- external positioning
They move the system.
Both styles are legitimate. Both are necessary.
This is why the CEO–CFO distinction exists in almost every organisation — not as a hierarchy of intelligence, but as a division of cognitive labour across decision phases.
Where things break down
Problems don’t arise because one style is wrong.
They arise when:
- organisations over-privilege one phase of decision-making
- incentives reward speed when coherence is required
- incentives reward caution when timing matters more
You see analytical leaders forced into premature commitment. You see competitive leaders overriding constraints they don’t fully understand.
And because these failures occur at different phases, people often talk past one another rather than recognising a timing mismatch.
What experience quietly teaches
Across domains — sport, aviation, markets, leadership — one pattern shows up consistently.
People who take the system seriously improve over time, regardless of style.
Experience teaches:
- when to slow down
- when analysis has peaked
- when commitment can’t be postponed
- and when optimisation becomes avoidance
The most effective teams aren’t those that choose between analytical and heuristic thinking.
They’re the ones that sequence them properly.
One reason these differences become so clear in simulation-based environments is that simulations compress time and consequence.
Decisions that might take months to play out in an organisation unfold over hours or days. The costs of delaying commitment, or committing too early, become immediately visible.
In that setting, you can see very clearly who is most comfortable in sense-making, who excels at managing constraints, and who naturally steps forward when commitment becomes unavoidable. Simulations don’t create these differences – they surface them.
The real leadership question
The real leadership challenge isn’t whether to be more intuitive or more analytical.
It’s this:
At which phase of the decision are we stuck — and which kinds of thinking are we rewarding right now?
Until organisations learn to ask that question explicitly, they will continue to confuse decisiveness with insight, and caution with wisdom.
Everything else is downstream of that.
esearch note (for readers who want sources)
The ideas in this article draw on established work across decision science, organisational theory, and behavioural strategy. Readers interested in the underlying research may find the following useful:
- Herbert A. Simon – Administrative Behavior Introduces bounded rationality and decision-making under constraints.
- Gerd Gigerenzer – Gut Feelings; Heuristics That Make Us Smart Explores when heuristic decision-making outperforms optimisation.
- Karl Weick – Sensemaking in Organizations Foundational work on sense-making as a distinct cognitive phase.
- James G. March – A Primer on Decision Making Distinguishes exploration, exploitation, and commitment in organisations.
- Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky – Selected papers on heuristics and judgment Classic work on analytical vs intuitive processing (with important limits).
- Kathleen Eisenhardt – Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High-Velocity Environments Empirical evidence on decision speed, structure, and performance.
These works inform the decision-phase framing used here, though the synthesis and application are my own.