In a moment of profound uncertainty, would you prefer to be seen as decisive, even if you knew that would lead to a negative outcome?
Or could you tolerate being seen as indecisive, if in time a positive outcome would emerge?
Sam Conniff asks this question in every leadership session he runs. The answer, rationally, is obvious. And yet across more than seven thousand leaders, four years of data, and every industry and geography Sam's team has tested: two-thirds choose the negative outcome. They choose to look decisive, even knowing it leads somewhere worse.
Sam calls this the decisiveness crisis. On this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, he joined Mina Seetharaman to unpack what's driving it, why senior leadership teams may be the most vulnerable layer in most organizations, and why the solution is more learnable than you might expect.
