I recently watched a Board wrestle with a genuinely difficult decision.

No one denied that the problem was complex, or the consequences were significant. There were competing interests, incomplete information, and considerably less time available than anyone would have liked.

Management had done some preparatory work, including a SWOT analysis, but as the conversation unfolded, I became increasingly interested in something else.

Not the decision itself, but how the Board was making it.

There was no obvious attempt to separate facts from assumptions. Alternatives were discussed but not systematically compared. More importantly, nobody stopped to ask whether the emerging consensus might be influenced by anchoring, confirmation bias, or groupthink.

Instead, the conversation gradually moved towards what Australians of a certain vintage might recognise from The Castle.

It was becoming about “the vibe of the thing”.

I don't mean that disparagingly. There were experienced, intelligent people around the table drawing upon years of accumulated knowledge. They had instincts about what felt right and what didn't.

But I found myself wondering whether instinct was being treated as an input into the decision or as the decision itself.

Intuition isn't necessarily the enemy

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, spent much of his career demonstrating how susceptible human judgment is to cognitive biases. Gary Klein, author of Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, built his career studying something that initially appeared almost contradictory: how experts can make remarkably good decisions through intuition.

When they eventually examined their differences together, they found considerably more agreement than might have been expected.

Their research (Kahneman and Klein, 2009) concluded that reliable intuition is most likely to develop when two conditions are met: 1) the environment contains sufficiently predictable patterns, and 2) the person has had sufficient opportunity to practise and receive feedback within that environment.

I explored this tension a couple of years ago in Trust Your Gut: Why Instinctive Decision-Making Leads to Success. My conclusion then was not that instinct should be discarded, but that school leaders need to know when it deserves their confidence and when the stakes demand something more deliberate. I still think that holds. What I am increasingly interested in, though, is what that “something more deliberate” should look like when there simply isn't much time.

Klein’s study on firefighters showed that an experienced firefighter, sensing that something is amiss inside a burning building, may have cultivated that very kind of intuition.

But consider some of the decisions a school Board might face.

Should we acquire another campus? Merge with another school? Borrow tens of millions of dollars? Change our operating model? Close a program? Respond to a sudden enrolment shock?

These aren't necessarily decisions directors make frequently enough to receive repeated, reliable feedback.

Klein highlights a crucial difference. A gut feeling can be a valuable data point, but it still needs to be consciously examined rather than simply accepted.

The vibe might be telling us something, but we haven't tested it.

A SWOT isn't a decision-making process

This was perhaps my biggest reflection from watching the Board.

There was a SWOT sitting in front of everyone.

Yet a structured paper hadn't necessarily produced a structured decision.

A SWOT can help organise information. It can identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats surrounding a proposal. What it doesn't naturally do is challenge the thinking occurring around the Board table.

It doesn't question which assumptions have quietly become accepted as facts.

It doesn't ensure the quietest director speaks before the most confident director shapes the conversation.

It doesn't ask what evidence would cause us to change our minds.

And it certainly doesn't protect against a group slowly converging on a position because everyone can sense that the clock is ticking.

This isn't simply theoretical. The Australian Institute of Company Directors recently highlighted groupthink as a significant weakness in Board decision-making and emphasised the importance of robust debate, deliberately testing assumptions, and creating opportunities for directors to contribute before a decision is made.

Its updated 2026 guidance on ethical Board decision-making similarly identifies groupthink, pressure for concurrence, and reactive decision-making under time pressure as traps that can undermine good judgement.

That made me wonder whether Boards need something much simpler at their disposal.

Not another 20-page governance policy.

A minimum viable decision process.

Decision-making under pressure needs some friction

When time is abundant, a Board can request another paper, commission advice, conduct consultation, model alternatives, or defer a decision until its next meeting.

Sometimes those luxuries don't exist.

But I increasingly think that when time becomes shorter, decision discipline should become tighter, not looser.

If I were developing a simple protocol for a Board facing a significant decision under pressure, I would want six questions in front of directors:

1. What actually needs to be decided now?
   Urgency needs testing too. Does the entire issue require resolution today, or only part of it? Sometimes the choice is not between deciding and delaying. It might be possible to make a smaller decision that preserves options while further information is gathered.
2. What do we know, what are we assuming, and what don't we know?
   I like this distinction because assumptions have a habit of quietly becoming facts during a fast-moving conversation. Even three columns on a whiteboard can expose where confidence is running ahead of evidence.
3. What options are genuinely available?
   The choice is rarely limited to accepting or rejecting management's recommendation. Could we stage it, pilot it, modify it, defer part of it, seek different information, or deliberately do nothing? Generating alternatives creates some distance between the problem and the first plausible solution.
4. What does each person think before the group discusses it?
   This might be the easiest protection against premature consensus. Before the Chair asks, “What does everyone think?”, give directors a moment to write down their own preferred option and why. Independent judgement becomes much harder once someone influential has confidently announced theirs.
5. Imagine we made this decision and twelve months later it had gone badly. What happened?
   Psychologist Gary Klein calls this a premortem. Instead of asking people whether they can see any risks, assume failure has already occurred and ask them to explain why. It gives people permission to surface concerns that may otherwise remain unspoken.
6. What would cause us to reconsider?
   A decision doesn't always need to represent certainty. It can represent the best judgement available from the evidence today. Identifying the assumptions, indicators, or events that would trigger reconsideration makes the decision easier to monitor and potentially easier to change.

None of these questions is particularly sophisticated.

That's partly the point.

If a Board has only 20 minutes to make an important decision, spending all 20 minutes on an unstructured conversation probably isn't the best use of those minutes.

The Chair creates the conditions for better decisions

There is another piece that no framework can replace.

The Chair.

A recent AICD discussion about groupthink described the practice of going around the table on contentious issues so every director has an opportunity to contribute before the decision is made.

That sounds almost too simple to matter.

I suspect it matters enormously.

Because good school Board decision-making isn't merely about assembling capable people. It is about creating conditions in which those people can disagree, question assumptions, introduce uncomfortable information, and change their minds without the discussion becoming personal.

And it certainly doesn't protect against a group slowly converging on a position because everyone senses the clock is ticking.

I've written previously about this in Everyone Agreed. That Was the Problem. My concern then was that harmony can sometimes masquerade as rigorous decision-making. When nobody challenges the emerging view, alternatives remain unexplored, assumptions go untested, and momentum starts doing the work that judgement should be doing. Under pressure, I suspect that risk becomes even greater.

Perhaps Boards need to practise the same muscle.

And practising in the middle of a crisis is a terrible time to invent your decision-making process.

I think we can all agree that the protocol should already exist. Or is that just more groupthink?

People should already know that assumptions will be challenged. Directors should expect independent views to be sought. The Chair should know how disagreement will be surfaced. And everyone should understand that reconsidering a decision when evidence changes isn't weakness.

That judgement starts with how well we make the original decision.

I don't think the lesson from watching that Board is that significantly complex decisions should take longer.

Sometimes they can't.

Nor do I think directors should suddenly distrust every instinct they've developed over decades of professional experience.

The lesson I took away was different.

Urgency should compress the decision-making process, not remove it.

The vibe of the thing may still matter. An experienced director's discomfort could be signalling something nobody has yet articulated. Another director's enthusiasm may come from recognising a pattern the data hasn't captured.

But those instincts should start questions rather than end them.

Why am I getting this feeling?

What assumption sits underneath it?

What evidence supports it?

What might I be missing?

And what would convince me that I'm wrong?

Perhaps good decision-making under pressure isn't about eliminating intuition at all.

It is about creating just enough friction between feeling something and deciding something that the Board has time to discover whether the vibe deserves its confidence.