Your urgency isn't the problem's urgency

Most rushed decisions aren't decisive.

They're sedatives.

A problem lands with no clear answer. The room goes quiet. Everyone looks at you. And the discomfort of not knowing quietly becomes the problem you're actually solving.

So you decide. The tension drops. Everyone feels better.

Three weeks later, you're unpicking it.

One question before you act

Is this urgent, or does it just feel urgent because I'm uncomfortable?

Some things are genuinely urgent. The server is down. Someone's safety is at risk. A legal deadline is tomorrow. Act.

Most things aren't. A competitor launches. A key client wobbles. A new AI tool makes half your roadmap look dated. These feel like emergencies. They're really decisions that deserve proper thinking, and they rarely get it.

Why fast feels right

Most leaders were promoted for having answers. Speed looks like competence. Silence looks like weakness.

But the higher you go, the more the job shifts from solving problems to making sure the right problem gets solved. A fast answer to the wrong question isn't leadership. It's rework with a deadline.

Waiting is not hiding

‍This isn't permission to go quiet.

In Strong back, soft front: most leaders have it backwards, I argued that bad news should travel fast. It still should. Information moves immediately. Decisions wait until they're ready.

The difference between thoughtful and indecisive is whether people know what you're waiting for. So tell them:

"We're not deciding this today. I want [the pipeline numbers] by Thursday, and we'll decide on Friday."

That's not a holding pattern. It's a plan with a date on it.

What to ask while you wait

‍What would we need to know to be confident?

What's actually urgent here, and what's just loud?

Who hasn't spoken yet?

Then go and get the answers.

Teach your team to wait with you

‍If your team learns that the fastest opinion wins, you'll only ever hear fast opinions.

Reward the person who says, "I'm not sure yet, but here's what I'd check." After you ask a hard question in a meeting, leave the silence alone. The best idea in the room rarely belongs to whoever speaks first.

The campaign they shouldn't have launched

I once worked with a leadership team that became convinced they needed to respond, immediately, to a competitor's new campaign.

The competitor had launched with sharper messaging, a strong offer and enough noise that within 48 hours the team was asking whether their own positioning suddenly looked dated.

The pressure was real. The deadline wasn't.

They rushed a response anyway. New campaign, new creative, budget pulled from work already planned. It went live fast, and for about a week it felt like they'd done exactly what good teams are supposed to do.

Then the numbers came in.

Engagement was weaker than the campaign they'd interrupted. Qualified leads dropped. Within a few weeks, they were moving budget back and rebuilding what they'd dismantled.

The campaign hadn't been solving a customer problem. It had been solving their discomfort.

The real cost wasn't the media spend. It was the distraction. A competitor had changed its marketing, and for three weeks, the team let it change theirs too.

If they'd waited five days, talked to customers and looked properly at the data, they'd have seen that the competitor's launch hadn't changed why people bought from them.

Nothing had happened to their strategy. They'd just become uncomfortable with it.

Urgency is a feeling

It isn't evidence.