The decisive edge: 5 steps to improve organizational decision making

I work with senior leaders who spend a good portion of their time in meetings with other senior leaders.

You’d think that because these leaders are facing similar challenges, at similar levels, communicating and influencing would be somewhat effortless between them. After all, who understands the challenges of senior leaders better than another senior leader?

Therein lies the rub. It’s true that senior leaders share plenty in common with one another, including similar blind spots, which is why the same types of communications challenges often come up between them. Here are of the most common mistakes we see leaders make and how to rethink communicating with your colleagues at your next meeting.

Remember that you’re never there to just inform one another

Bringing a group of senior leaders together is an expensive proposition. It’s why if you’re asking your highest-paid people to meet, it should only be for a handful of reasons: To make a decision, agree on a path forward, address an urgent matter, debate an important idea, and so on. Bringing senior leaders together to simply inform one another, provide updates or discuss problems with no real resolution is low value for them and their organizations. If you want to inform, share a pre-read, or send along a dashboard link.

Focus on how to move from informing to action

To get at this, stop talking about what you’re working on and start shifting the conversation to produce more results to come out of the conversation. If you’re leading a discussion with other senior leaders, always decide what result you’re there to achieve ahead of time: A decision? Agreement on a plan of action? Alignment around a commitment? Then, determine how you’ll achieve the result in the time given. Don’t underestimate how much more impact and value you can immediately create with those two simple steps.

Own the fact that you are there to sell

Producing results is not a neutral activity, which is why if you’re leading a discussion with other senior executives, remember that you’re there to sell your colleagues on a course of action. Just because they are your peers doesn’t mean they want the same things—or that they are automatically on board with your agenda. It’s your job to persuade, to influence, to break through the noise and get this in-demand audience to care. Sharing compelling data and information may be a helpful starting point, but if you’re meeting with other senior leaders, those are table stakes. To win hearts and minds, do more to put your audience at the center and engage them on how your idea will help them win.

Make the audience the star of the movie

Think about your discussions with other senior leaders like movies, and if the star is you instead of them, you’ve lost the plot. To influence, help the audience see how they benefit in the future you’re describing. To do that, storytelling is key. Your executive peers can be the toughest audience a leader can face. It’s all the more important to paint a compelling picture of the future state. Describe the potential opportunity in realistic, credible terms, walk the audience through a path to achieving the future that feels doable. It may be tempting to boil the ocean or go heavy on the doom and gloom language (“we’re going to be out of business in five years if we don’t start now”), but a little goes a long way. Most of us don’t want to star in a depressing movie, so to influence, work on a compelling narrative that your audience wants to be part of.

Play to win

The biggest mistake I see senior executives make with one another in meetings? They play not to lose, instead of playing to win. In practice, this might look like keeping comments safe when sharing ideas, checking out or multitasking, keeping quiet, refusing to challenge each other in meetings, or not holding peers accountable to achieving results in discussions. The impact is that we miss the opportunity to have the types of high value, business-moving conversations that senior leaders can and should be having. To get at this, self-awareness is essential, and it may require you to do more to make sure your leadership voice can be heard. For many, this may require preparing differently, sharing ideas in a bolder way, or doing more to make sure the value of your ideas is obvious to the audience.

There may be no single action a company can take to improve its business more powerful than this: Enable your senior executive peers to engage in high value conversations with each other, more often, because when this happens, the benefits are far and wide. Decisions get made, alignment is strengthened, and that accelerates results for companies. Equally important, when senior executives show up differently for each other, they create new norms, elevate the culture, and set an even higher standard for performance.

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How do mindsets impact your behavior in moments?

Your life is built by the moments that you experience daily. As you enter each moment, your brain triggers a mindset that offers a thought, belief, feeling, or attitude. This mindset influences how you will engage in the moment presented. In other words, your behavior is directly influenced by the mindset that you adopt in each moment.

Here’s an example. Imagine you are receiving unexpected critical feedback from a respected coworker after giving a presentation to a group of senior leaders. How you react to that feedback will be shaped by the mindset that you adopt in that moment. There are three mindsets that could be activated:

1. I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable and no further improvement is needed.
2. I believe my presentation was poor and I hope no-one noticed.
3. I believe my presentation was perfectly acceptable yet there is always room for improvement.

Now think about how you would behave during and after your feedback conversation while holding each respective mindset.

• Which mindset will lead you toward taking action on improving your ability to present?
• Which mindset will have a greater impact on your overall personal development?
• Which mindset will have a greater likelihood of driving results that advance your career in the long run?

The answer to these questions is obviously the third mindset. It is consistent with the “growth mindset,” in which you believe that mistakes are opportunities for growth. There are a number of universal mindsets that are powerful for everyone – a growth mindset is one of them.

But, each universal mindset also has its “shadow”or a negative mindset that is triggered in specific moments. In the example provided, it is the fear of not getting it right. This shadow gets triggered if the presentation was particularly important, if you were presenting to an audience you found tricky, or even if you are having a stressful day. To change how you show up in key moments, it’s critical to be self-aware and look out for when you exhibit both constructive mindsets and the shadows that prevent you from exhibiting them.

Humans are not just reactive in terms of the mindset that become active. Choosing the mindset that is activated in each moment is fully under your control. While emotions are powerful and can easily lead to embracing a less productive mindset, you have the executive functioning capability to override your initial primitive emotional reactions.

Everyone has experienced adopting less productive mindsets during stressful moments, but the choice is always under your control. It is just a matter of being able to manage which mindset is elicited even when negative emotions like anxiety or fear are running high.

How can you change your behavior in the moment?

Changing behavior is not easy. It takes a lot of work and people often fail. So much so that many believe humans are incapable of change. People often fail to change because too much focus is placed on behaviors rather than the main inhibitor of successful change - mindsets.

Here’s an example. Suppose you just took a course to develop your reflective listening skills. Reflective listening is a powerful tool that helps people combat their own unconscious biases to increase their awareness of what others are truly communicating.

Using this tool allows you to check your interpretation of what others are saying and give the person a chance to correct your understanding. When used appropriately, reflective listening helps build both trust and empathy by making a person truly feel heard.

After completing this skill-building course, you are empowered to use this new skill on the job to build better relations and work more effectively with your coworkers.

Two weeks after you completed the reflective listening course, a team member, Taj approaches you with some big personal news that will impact his ability to show up for work for an undetermined amount of time.

Taj is currently leading an important initiative that is very visible in the eyes of senior leaders. The news is stressful for you because losing Taj at this stage of the project will very disruptive and possibly derail the success of the project.

How do you react when Taj is sharing the news? The perfect opportunity has arisen to use your new reflective listening skills, but will you? How you react depends on your mindset. There are two competing mindsets that could be elicited in this moment:

1. At Taj’s level, you expect him to be able to juggle the personal and professional. You expect him to find a way to deliver his commitments regardless of what is happening outside of work.
2. Taj may well need support in this difficult time. It is important to me to find the best way to help him regardless of current work demands.

If you have the first mindset when you enter the conversation with Taj, there is a low likelihood that you are going to engage in reflective listening due to your belief that a person must honor their work commitments first and foremost. Embracing this belief will lead you to set the precedent that Taj must figure out some way to fulfill his obligation.

Your ability to truly show your new reflective listening skill is blocked when you have the first mindset. It’s not because you don’t have the skill to demonstrate reflective listening behaviors, it’s because your mindset leads you down a path that shows a different set of behaviors.

Conversely, entering into the conversation with the second mindset primes you to show empathy towards Taj, which is the basis of reflective listening. The congruity between your mindset and behavior in this instance set you up to use your new skill without experiencing any internal discord.

This lack of dissonance between the mindset and behavior is important. When you enter a situation with a mindset to “experience and understand Taj’s world,” listening is natural. But sometimes these moments are triggers. For example, you may feel differently if Taj has a history of taking time off for personal reasons or you feel personal pressure to succeed on the project. In these situations, you are unlikely to have the mindset, “experience and understand others’ worlds” and may enter the situation expecting Taj to deliver, as in the first mindset.

What is holding people back from changing their behavior in moments?

True behavior change will not happen without making the proper mindset shifts. People often assume that skill development equals behavior change, meaning a person will demonstrate new behaviors if they develop a new skill. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Just because a person develops a new skill doesn’t mean they will demonstrate it if there isn’t harmony between their new behaviors and mindset in each situation they experience.

Yet it does take more than one instance of showing new behaviors in order to signify true change. Demonstrating the set of new behaviors in a single instance is not a case for change. It takes repetition for a person to build new habits to allow them to move away from instinctively using old behavioral patterns in similar moments.

Most individual development plans or programs being delivered in organizations today are primarily centered around skill-building. While the focus around skill development does teach people how to perform new behaviors, it doesn’t target the mindset shifts necessary to actually leverage those skills when the relevant moment appears.

Without a shift in mindset, you will continue to perform the behaviors aligned with your current mindset and never use your new skill even if you know how to perform it. A mindset shift needs to happen first to enable you to show your new set of behaviors.

Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change —new platforms are making coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.

For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.

The limits of unlimited (coaching)

Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?

In practice, quite a bit.

When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.

Three patterns emerge:

1.  Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
2. ‍Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.‍
3. Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.

The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.

The relationship is the lever

Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.

When a coach and client build trust over time — developing shared language, returning to the same themes with increasing depth — something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.

The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.

Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.

1. Consistency

The foundation everything else is built on.

The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature — let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.

A stable coaching relationship works differently:

• The coach starts to see around corners — patterns the client can't see themselves
• The client stops performing and starts being honest
• The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions

Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.

2. Continuity

What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.

Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.

What continuity makes possible

• A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
• A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
• Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on

That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.

3. Completion

The most underrated principle of the three.

In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.

A clear endpoint

Creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most

• Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
• Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations

For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.

Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)‍ 

The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.

Practical design decisions

• Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
• Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
• Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization ‍
• Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work ‍
• Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one

Questions to pressure-test your design

• Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
• Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
• Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?

Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.

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Three decisions that changed everything.

Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.

We would become our own Customer Zero.

While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.

So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:

1. No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
2. IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
3. Don’t wait for certainty.

We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.

What if we started this company today?

Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.

We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.

Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.

The team asked a simple question:

"What if we were to start our company today?”

That question started the flywheel.

They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.

The messy middle.

At first, the team was underwhelmed._‍

The early reports were blunt:

“Not good with math.”

“Poor graph capabilities.”

The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.

This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.

Each cycle produced something:

• A sharper scenario
• A faster build
• A more powerful simulation

The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.

When the diamond appeared.

Then something shifted.

The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”

And what emerged wasn’t incremental:

• What used to take weeks started happening in days.
• Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
• Clients became self-serving.
• Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.

This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.

It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.

95% adoption in eight weeks.

Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.

BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.

And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.

So we expected resistance.

Instead, something surprising happened.

In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.

It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.

This moved on its own. Why? 

We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.

The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.

• Joy
• Excitement
• Pride

As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.

There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.

And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.

It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.

Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.

The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?

In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.

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La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.

Ed è lì che si perde valore.

I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
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Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.

Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.

“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”

In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:

• Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
• Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
• Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
• Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
• Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso

Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.

Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.