Rehearsing for Decisions Under Pressure: Judgment, Critical Thinking, Foresight and Creativity in Action
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Imagine this scenario: You're a senior manager reporting to the COO.
On Monday morning you receive a message from the COO to meet them in the boardroom. When you get there, you're surprised to see the CHRO sitting at the table opposite the COO. The atmosphere in the room is tense - it's clear they're not on the same page.
Immediately you feel that you're right in the middle of something.
The COO wants to talk to you about one of your employees who, after 3 years of performing well, has been underperforming for the past few months, leaving work undone, coming in late and placing a greater strain on the other members of your team.
You've been acutely aware of this. Your team have complained. You've had some conversations with the employee and you strongly suspect that they are having mental health issues - but when you spoke to the COO about this, they told you to not ever bring that up - "you don't want to open that can of worms".
But in the last performance conversation with the employee, they indicated that they might need stress leave, and that it may be long-term.
Now you are at the table. The COO is pushing to terminate the employee. The CHRO is strongly in favor of allowing the employee to access the extended care benefits that included counselling, stress leave and whatever else is needed to support them.
The COO is very clear that they expect you to agree with them and "have the guts to make the tough choices" - but you are acutely aware of one thing... they are not very trustworthy and have been known to throw people under the bus when things go south.
The CHRO is very clear that termination without cause could possibly result in legal action. You feel in your gut that its the right thing to do... but you also know it is a long, drawn out process and, if you make this choice, you're going directly against what your boss wants you to do.
They both turn to you. "It's your employee - your decision. What are you going to do?".
Simulations don't work if they are not high-quality, realistic and believable.
WHY REHEARSALS ARE A POWERFUL WAY TO PRACTICE COMPLEX DECISION-MAKING AND EXPERIENCE THE OUTCOMES.
While most organizations rely on experience or college education to equip their leaders for complex decision-making, they often fail to conduct rehearsals that expose their assumptions, consider alternatives, receive feedback and revisit their reasoning. Here are 5 reasons why immersive consequence-based rehearsals are a valuable training tool for judgment, foresight, critical thinking, creativity and emotional intelligence.
The workplace is an expensive place to make your first attempt.
A manager’s first encounter with suspected misconduct, an emotionally distressed employee or pressure to conceal a mistake may affect someone’s livelihood, a customer relationship or the organization’s reputation.
Rehearsal creates an opportunity to make a choice, examine its implications and try another approach while the consequences are contained.
The business case starts with a practical question: Which decisions are too consequential to leave entirely to learning through mistakes?
Pressure and emotion can weaken clear thinking skills
A meta-analysis found that acute stress impaired working memory and cognitive flexibility abilities involved in holding several considerations in mind and changing approach when circumstances change.
The implication for preparation is straightforward: people need opportunities to practice thinking while facing manageable uncertainty, urgency and disagreement.
Demonstrating understanding in a calm setting provides only part of the picture.
Knowing the principle doesn't resolve the hardest part of applying it.
The cliche advice and learning is much harder to apply in the "messiness" of real-world situations and corporate interpersonal dynamics.
“Be transparent” sounds straightforward until disclosure threatens an important relationship.
“Challenge assumptions” becomes harder when the assumption belongs to the most senior person in the room.
Rehearsal can place participants inside those tensions: incomplete information, politics, unspoken threats, competing responsibilities, an impatient colleague and a deadline. It gives them something concrete to work through: what to ask, what to challenge, when to pause and how to explain their decision.
An organization’s values become meaningful through the decisions people can make when upholding them becomes uncomfortable.
Years of experience do not guarantee the right opportunities to develop judgment.
Someone can spend years in management without encountering a particular crisis—or repeat a poor approach because nobody provides useful feedback.
Well-designed rehearsal can deliberately provide relevant situations, feedback and opportunities to reconsider. Its value comes from the quality of those opportunities.
Rehearsal gives people an opportunity to examine what happens after their decision.
A decision can solve the immediate problem while creating another: a rushed announcement triggers mistrust; your decision conflicts with what your boss wanted; doing the right thing creates worse consequences.
A branching scenario lets participants explore plausible consequences and reconsider the original choice. This is a design argument rather than proof that a simulation predicts the future.
Its purpose is to encourage questions such as: Who responds next? What might they misunderstand? What would make us change direction?
Rehearsal makes readiness something an organization can examine.
A scenario can reveal whether participants seek missing information, consider alternatives, identify affected people and revise their position when evidence changes.
Those behaviors provide concrete targets for development. In a randomized clinical communication study, simulation organized around explicit proficiency standards outperformed both online instruction alone and online instruction with standard simulation.
One last important point - simulations don't work if they are not high-quality, realistic and believable. If participants don't believe it's real - even for a second - the illusion will be broken and the experience destroyed. This was supported in research by Cole, Ragan and others- it was found that superior simulations garnered more reliable beneficial effects than inferior simulations. Cole, S., Smith, D., Ragan, K. et al. Synthesizing the effects of mental simulation on behavior change: Systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis. Psychon Bull Rev 28, 1514–1537 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-01880-6
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