How to Make Better Decisions

How to Make Better Decisions (not perfect ones)

In January 1994, Peter Blake and his crew took ENZA New Zealand back out onto the Southern Ocean and broke the Jules Verne round-the-world record by nearly five days. Six months earlier, they'd been forced to abandon the same attempt when the hull struck a submerged object 26 days in. Instead of walking away, Blake had the boat extended by three metres, the hull reinforced, and the sails trimmed. The initial failure didn't mean the decisions behind the original design were wrong: it provided the data needed to make the next call better. He fixed the hull, reinforced the rig, and committed to sailing faster than anyone else.

The following year, as syndicate head of Team New Zealand, he built the 1995 America's Cup campaign on the same principle. Sailors and designers in the same room; real-world feedback shaping every engineering decision. The people who understood the problem were the people solving it. The result was Black Magic: 42 wins from 46 races, a 5-0 series victory against Team Stars and Stripes, and the America's Cup leaving the United States for only the second time in its 144-year history.

Eight years later, having defended the Cup in 2000, Team New Zealand lost it. Around 30 sailors had left to join the challenging syndicates. The design process continued, relying on the same engineering pedigree that won in 1995. But the engineering inputs couldn’t substitute for the value of hands-on feedback and, without the sailors in the room connecting technical design with operational reality, the design loop broke. The 2003 boat snapped its mast and collapsed under pressure. 

Same engineering excellence, decisions made with absent inputs, led to failure that hindsight would say was predictable. It’s a scene not limited to boatbuilding and it plays out across boardroom tables every day.

The push for - and cost of - outcomes without investment

When the corporate input loop breaks, it rarely makes the evening news like a snapped mast. Instead, the damage is far less visible but just as expensive. 

In 2025, Redvespa asked New Zealand business leaders what their organisations should value more. The answers were consistent: leadership, purpose, culture, creativity. Conversely, the perceived value of imagination and curiosity has dropped five points since 2022. The outcome shows a business world which demands measurable outcomes, but is reluctant to invest in the inputs required to achieve them.

This is a critical failure in our decision making processes. If we do not value curiosity, we inhibit our ability to ask better questions. Without better questions, we cannot gather the high-quality information required to improve our judgement. We are starving the feedback loop at the exact moment we need it most.

Right now, New Zealand leaders are squeezed by a mandate to 'do more with less'. This pressure forces a constant trade-off between speed and rigour, making it dangerously easy to rely on past pedigree rather than current reality. When the questions stop, the consequences are immediate: hidden workflows, shadow IT, delivery trade-offs, and over-loaded teams.

Go get your inputs

Knowing the symptoms doesn't fix the problem. If you want better inputs, you need to be intentional about finding them. You need people who understand the process and the non-negotiables to build that feedback loop. That way, if key talent jumps ship, your system survives and you can still source the hard evidence required to inform your decisions. No snapped masts on your watch.

A good decision relies on having the right information, and the inputs that matter most rarely arrive unsolicited. You have to go and get them. This is where curiosity becomes an operational tool. Good analysis earns its place here: not as a substitute for deciding, but as the mechanism that makes the decision possible.

While some backing data might come passively, you will get far more valuable insight through real conversations with the people closest to the problem. You need the person who deals with the downstream consequences every day.

Blake didn't design Black Magic from a distance. The sailors were in the room, and their knowledge shaped the boat. In 2003 they weren't, and the difference became painfully obvious when it mattered most.

Ready, or just fast?

Once you have the inputs, the next test is whether you're ready to decide, or are simply being driven by a need to look decisive. Sam Conniff, author of The Uncertainty Toolkit, asked more than seven thousand leaders the same question across four years: would you rather appear decisive and get a worse outcome, or appear uncertain and get a better one? 

Two-thirds chose to look decisive.

This isn’t a new thing. In 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa capsized on its maiden voyage after a pre-departure stability test went badly wrong. The vessel rolled so alarmingly that the admiral overseeing it cut the test short. Rather than take his doubts to the king, he let the boat sail. After only a couple of minutes on the open water, the first gust beyond a breeze caused her to list and pushed water onto the gundeck. She sank swiftly and, in front of a huge crowd, embarrassingly.

The most common decision-making failure isn't paralysis. It is valuing speed, and the appearance of certainty, over operational truth. 

Make the call with confidence in your inputs, not in the appearance of your confidence.

The irreplaceable role of (human) judgement

The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report assessed more than 2,800 skills against the potential for AI to replace them. The findings report concluded that human judgement and interaction cannot be replaced.

In an age of automated synthesis, human judgement is the bottleneck. Everything else can scale, but we desperately need judgement at two critical points: evaluating the rigour of the data going into the system, and making the final call on what comes out. AI can process the noise, but it cannot evaluate the operational reality. The call is yours: it can be informed, and it can be challenged, but not handed off.

Most decisions feel hard because we've built a world so full of them we don't know how to apply our attention. We agonise over ones with inconsequential differences, stall on big ones hoping they'll make themselves, and avoid others even when we know exactly what it costs us to sit on our hands.

Every week brings another headline about what AI will replace. Most of that is outside your control. The quality of your judgement is not. In a world drowning in data, the scarce resource is the willingness to get close to the ground, demand better inputs, and make the call.

Once you’ve made your call, stay close enough to reality to respond when it surprises you. Blake didn't abandon the Jules Verne attempt because ENZA struck something in the dark. He went back to the boat, found what had failed, fixed it, and went again. 

Most organisations have better inputs than they use and better judgement than they trust. Changing that is your decision.

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Jamie is Redvespa's Head of Experience. He finds the place he most needs to model decisiveness is with his kids at home, regularly adapting the decision-making processes he uses in his Redvespa role to his role as a father.