The Science of Crisis Decision-Making: How to Make the Right Calls Under Pressure
Imagine this: you’re a military commander leading a team on operations. Suddenly, your unit is ambushed. Gunfire erupts. There’s no time to analyse the situation in detail - your decision in the next five seconds will determine whether your team makes it out alive (as well as their own counter-ambush training but let’s stay on track here!). This example will likely resonate with anyone who’s served in the military, but let’s replace that battlefield with a corporate boardroom. The crisis? A massive cyberattack, a product recall or a financial scandal that could cripple the company’s reputation. The pressure is just as intense, and while the consequences are much less likely to result in physical injuries, the consequences for your organisation could be severe. So why do some leaders thrive in crisis while others crumble?
The answer lies in neuroscience, psychology and military-grade training techniques that dictate how the human brain processes information under extreme stress. This article explores the science of crisis decision-making, drawing lessons from my experience in aviation as a student pilot, in the military and working in, and leading, high-performance teams - looks at how businesses can apply these same principles to build crisis-ready leaders.
1️⃣ The Neuroscience of Crisis Decision-Making
When a crisis hits, leaders don’t have the luxury of analysing every detail before making a decision. The brain is forced to work in overdrive, relying on rapid pattern recognition, instinct and past experiences to make split-second choices.
Key Brain Functions at Play in a Crisis:
✅ Prefrontal Cortex – Responsible for logic, planning and rational thinking. Under stress, it can become overwhelmed, leading to slow decision-making or analysis paralysis.
✅ Amygdala – Controls emotions and fear response. If unchecked, it can cause panic-driven, impulsive decision-making.
✅ Hippocampus – Stores memory and learned experiences. In high-stress situations, it retrieves past crisis responses, determining whether a leader reacts effectively or repeats past mistakes.
Why This Matters: Military and Aviation Decision-Making Under Stress
Example: Military Combat Training and the Role of Instinctive Decision-Making
Elite soldiers, such as special forces operators, don’t make decisions in a gunfight the way most civilians would. They don’t stop to evaluate every possible course of action. Instead, they act instinctively based on years and years of rigorous training
How the Military Builds Crisis Decision-Making Muscle Memory:
✅ Live-fire simulations and repetitive drills condition soldiers to react without hesitation, minimising cognitive overload.
✅ Tactical decision-making exercises ensure that instinctive responses are effective, not reckless.
✅ Exercise conditions are designed to simulate sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion and high levels of stress in order to further embed instinctive responses in extreme conditions.
✅ Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) or After Action Reviews (AARs) refine decision-making skills by analysing what worked - and what didn’t.
Business Lesson: Organisations must build the same level of instinctive crisis response training into their leadership teams, using crisis simulations, structured decision frameworks and post-crisis reviews.
2️⃣ The Power of Muscle Memory in Crisis Response
When fighter pilots eject from a malfunctioning aircraft, they don’t pause to think about how to pull the eject handle. Their training has conditioned them to react without hesitation. The same principle applies to business crises. Leaders who train in crisis scenarios make better real-time decisions because their brains have already rehearsed similar situations.
Example: Captain “Sully” Sullenberger and the “Miracle on the Hudson” (2009)
When US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after striking birds, Captain Sullenberger had 208 seconds to react.
Instead of panicking or second-guessing, he executed a textbook water landing, saving all 155 passengers.
His decision wasn’t luck - it was decades of scenario-based training that built decision-making muscle memory, as stated in the movie.
Business Lesson: Organisations must train leaders with structured crisis simulations so they don’t hesitate or freeze in real-world emergencies.
✅ Repetition builds reliability. Leaders who repeatedly practice crisis decision-making will make faster, more confident choices under pressure.
✅ Checklists reduce cognitive load. Pilots, surgeons and military teams use checklists to streamline decision-making. Businesses should apply the same principles in crisis plans.
✅ Post-incident reviews reinforce learning. After-action reports train teams to identify and correct bad decisions before they occur again.
3️⃣ Crisis Leadership: Why Cognitive Overload Causes Fatal Errors
The aviation and military industries obsessively study human errors in crisis situations. One key finding? Cognitive overload leads to decision paralysis - or deadly mistakes.
Example: Air France Flight 447 (2009) - A Classic Case of Cognitive Overload
The aircraft’s airspeed sensors failed, and the autopilot disengaged.
The pilots, overwhelmed by alarms and warning lights, misdiagnosed the situation and kept making incorrect control inputs.
The plane stalled and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 passengers.
Business Lesson: Crisis leaders need to be able to see the big picture and not get fixated on the details. A key challenge for developing and mid-career leaders (in any sector or role) is stepping back and letting your team members handle the details. Well-scoped roles and responsibilities in your crisis team is one way of enabling this outcome.
What Went Wrong?
✅ The pilots became fixated on one piece of incorrect data rather than assessing the full picture.
✅ They ignored critical cues from the aircraft that could have prevented disaster.
✅ Cognitive overload impaired their ability to apply correct decision-making protocols.
This is where cognitive biases - like Normalcy Bias - come into play. Normalcy bias is the tendency to underestimate the likelihood and impact of a crisis, assuming things will return to normal despite clear warning signs.
Real-World Example:
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments and companies hesitated to act, assuming the virus would remain localised. Despite clear signals from public health experts, businesses failed to activate contingency plans, leading to severe supply chain disruptions and workforce shortages.
Business Lesson: Crisis leaders must recognise when “business as usual” thinking is no longer valid and be prepared to shift quickly into emergency mode when needed.
4️⃣ How to Improve Crisis Decision-Making in Business
To train leaders for high-pressure crisis response, organisations need a structured approach that draws on these military, aviation and neuroscience-backed lessons.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Overestimating Crisis Leadership Ability
One of the biggest cognitive traps in crisis leadership is the Dunning-Kruger Effect - where individuals overestimate their ability to handle high-pressure situations because they lack the experience to recognise their own gaps in knowledge.
Case Study Example:
During the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP executives initially downplayed the severity of the disaster, assuming they had it under control - despite engineers warning that the situation was far worse than expected. Their overconfidence delayed an effective response, worsening both the environmental damage and public backlash.
Business Lesson: Leaders must recognise their own biases and train for crisis response in advance, rather than assuming their instincts will be correct under pressure.
The OODA Loop: A Military Framework for Crisis Decisions
Originally developed by Colonel John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, the OODA Loop is a decision-making framework that has been adopted by military strategists, corporate leaders and crisis management professionals alike. I’ve used it in my military service and I’m sure many readers have used it (or variants of it) as well.
The Four Phases of the OODA Loop:
1️⃣ Observe: Gather real-time information about the situation.
✅ Example: A cybersecurity team detects a ransomware attack in progress and begins gathering intel on its scope and impact.
2️⃣ Orient: Analyse the data, assess risks and determine possible courses of action.
✅ Example: Executives review legal, reputational and operational risks, consulting experts to refine their response strategy.
3️⃣ Decide: Choose the best course of action based on available intelligence.
✅ Example: The crisis team decides to shut down affected servers, notify regulators and deploy a PR response strategy.
4️⃣ Act: Implement the decision swiftly and monitor results.
✅ Example: IT begins containment efforts, while the comms team manages media relations and customer messaging.
Why the OODA Loop Works in a Crisis:
✅ It prioritises rapid decision-making while still allowing for adaptability.
✅ It prevents decision paralysis by forcing leaders to act based on real-time intelligence.
✅ It helps crisis teams stay ahead of an unfolding crisis rather than reacting too late.
Business Lesson: Organisations must train leaders to move through the OODA Loop quickly, ensuring they don’t get stuck in endless analysis while a crisis worsens.
Conclusion: The Future of Crisis Leadership
Great crisis leaders aren’t born - they are trained. Military operators, pilots and elite emergency responders all follow a science-backed approach to decision-making under pressure - one that businesses must adopt.
🚀 Want to build a crisis-ready organisation?
CrisisCompass provides structured crisis simulations, training and real-world decision-making tools based on OODA and other proven models, leveraging our experience in the military, high threat environments and corporate crisis leadership roles. Reach out and see you how can leverage this experience today.