Nele Dael and I have a new piece out in I by IMD on something we hear from nearly every executive we work with: the pace has picked up, the future feels less clear, and the instinct is to move faster.
We think that instinct is backwards. The thinking that matters most happens long before the moment of decision. Sully Sullenberger had less than four minutes after the bird strike, but the call to put the plane in the Hudson rested on thousands of hours of flying, scenario preparation, and training. Surgeons, emergency responders, and elite military units work the same way. Decisiveness in the moment is bought with preparation beforehand.
The piece lays out three ways to protect that thinking time. Build supply: budget it in advance and protect it like any other commitment, and count active recovery as part of the work rather than a reward for finishing it. Delegate: give up the things you do well, maybe better than anyone, not just the things you can’t do. Say no more often: the hard requests are the reasonable ones, and the right test isn’t whether something is worthwhile on its own but whether it survives against everything you’ve already committed to.
António Horta-Osório’s first eight months at Lloyds is the cautionary version. Two or three hours of sleep a night, a clinic stay, two months away from the bank while the share price fell. He came back with strict boundaries, no email or calls between 7pm and 7am, and went on to lead Lloyds for a decade.
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Read the full piece at I by IMD
Co-authored with Nele Dael, Senior Behavioral Scientist at IMD and co-lead of the Workplace Well-being Initiative.
