Decision Making: The Best Leaders Don't Make the Call. They Build the Room That Does.
- Kylee Ingram
- Apr 8
- 6 min read
What if the way you run decisions is the biggest risk in your organisation?
There is a version of leadership that gets rewarded, promoted, and celebrated in organisations every day. The leader who cuts through ambiguity. Who reads the room and makes the call. Who is decisive when others hesitate.
Decision science says that leader is often the biggest risk in the room.
Not because they lack intelligence. Not because their instincts are wrong. But because the moment a leader signals the direction they are leaning, the room reorganises itself around that signal. The Guardian who saw a risk nobody had named stays quiet. The Analyzer who needed two more days to stress-test the numbers lets it go. The Collaborator who knew a key voice was missing says nothing. The captain makes the call — and the call is shaped entirely by what the captain already thought.
This is not a failure of character. It is a structural failure of how the decision room was designed.
It is also the central argument of Dr. Juliet Bourke's Which Two Heads Are Better Than One? — one of the most rigorously evidenced books on decision-making and inclusive leadership published in the last decade. At Wizer, it sits at the foundation of how we think about decision science, cognitive diversity, and what organisations actually need to make better decisions.
The problem is not who is in the room. It is who is running it.
Dr. Bourke's research identified six distinct cognitive dimensions that shape how people approach decisions: outcomes, options, people, process, evidence, and risk. A leadership group with genuine cognitive diversity should bring all six to every major decision.
Dr. Bourke's field research found that leadership groups are routinely dominated by one or two of these dimensions — most commonly outcomes and options. Evidence-driven, process-oriented, and people-focused thinking gets progressively squeezed out — not by design, but by the quiet, compounding pressure of culture drift. As leadership habits form, people mirror the dominant thinking styles of those above them. Achiever and Visionary profiles accumulate at the top. The organisation believes it is deciding well, while quietly replicating the same blind spots, cycle after cycle.
Three forces drive this narrowing. Social bias determines who gets listened to — hierarchy and seniority compress the room toward the dominant style. Information bias shapes what data gets valued and what gets dismissed. Capacity bias kicks in under pressure, defaulting the group toward fast, outcome-focused thinking at precisely the moment when careful, evidence-based analysis matters most.
> The leader who makes every call is the biggest risk in the room.
What changes in decision-making when the right leader is present
When an inclusive leader runs the decision room — not just a leader with diverse thinkers present, but one who actively creates the conditions for that diversity to surface — Dr. Bourke's research found that decision error rates fall by approximately 30% and innovation capacity rises by around 20%.
Those figures come from rigorous field research conducted through Deloitte, not a leadership survey. They hold across sectors and organisation types. And they carry a specific implication that most leadership development programmes have not caught up with: the cognitive diversity required for better decisions already exists in most organisations. The constraint is not the people. It is the leader's ability to unlock what those people bring.
To understand why that unlocking so rarely happens, Dr. Bourke introduces a framework that every leadership team should know.
The Inclusion Staircase
Dr. Bourke's Inclusion Staircase identifies three distinct steps that determine whether the people in a decision room actually contribute what they are capable of contributing.
Step one is fairness and respect. People feel they have an equal chance to participate. It is the baseline, not the goal.
Step two is value and belonging. People feel that their uniqueness is recognised, that they are genuinely heard, and that they are connected to the group. Difference begins to be treated as an asset rather than a courtesy.
Step three is confidence and inspiration. People feel motivated, empowered, safe, and trusted. This is the only step at which people will bring their full cognitive contribution to a decision. A Guardian who is tolerated will not name the risk. An Analyzer who is not trusted will not hold the line on incomplete evidence. A Collaborator who feels unheard will not surface the voice that is missing from the room.
The 30% reduction in decision errors and the 20% increase in innovation both sit entirely at step three. Getting people into the room gets you to step one. Most decision rooms stop there and never understand why the quality of their decisions does not improve.
The six signature traits of inclusive leadership
Through Dr. Bourke's research at Deloitte, six specific behaviours define leaders who consistently get their decision rooms to step three. They are observable, teachable, and measurable.
Commitment means treating inclusion as a deliberate and sustained practice — not a stated value that disappears under pressure or when a deadline arrives.
Courage means being willing to name bias when it appears in the room, including the leader's own. It means protecting the dissenting voice rather than smoothing it over, and holding space for the perspective that the dominant thinking style wants to dismiss.
Cognisance of bias means maintaining an active, ongoing awareness of how social, information, and capacity bias are shaping the decision being made — applied to every significant decision, not treated as a one-time training exercise.
Curiosity is expressed through questions rather than conclusions. The inclusive leader asks what they do not know. They do not enter the room having already decided, then gather input to confirm it.
Cultural intelligence is the ability to read and adapt to different thinking styles, not just different demographic backgrounds. A Guardian and an Achiever are processing the same decision in fundamentally different ways. The inclusive leader can see that difference and make deliberate use of it.
Collaboration means structuring decisions so that genuine contribution is distributed before the weight of seniority closes the conversation — deliberate, structured input from the full range of cognitive styles present, before the call gets made.
These are not personality traits leaders either have or do not have. They are decisions a leader makes every time they walk into a decision room.
Seven questions for leadership groups
This is where Dr. Bourke's research meets what we see every day at Wizer. The question is not only whether your organisation has inclusive leaders — it is whether your decision rooms are actually structured to surface what your people bring.
These are the questions every leadership group should be sitting with honestly.
Who is not speaking, and why? In your last significant decision, who contributed most? Who was quiet? Was the silence a choice — or a signal that something in the room made full contribution feel unsafe?
Are you assembling decision groups on availability or on cognitive fit? The most common reason the wrong people are in a decision room is also the simplest — they were free. Availability is not a decision design principle.
What thinking styles dominate your leadership layer? Dr. Bourke's research consistently finds Achiever and Visionary profiles clustering at the top of organisations, with evidence, process, and people orientations underrepresented. Do you actually know your organisation's cognitive distribution — or are you assuming a balance you have never measured?
Does disagreement in your room stay focused on the decision? Productive cognitive friction is the point of bringing different thinkers together. When challenge becomes personal, or when people learn that dissent carries a cost, the room narrows — and stays narrow.
Are you at step one, two, or three of the Inclusion Staircase? Getting people into the room is step one. Making them feel their difference is genuinely valued is step two. Creating the conditions where they feel safe, trusted, and motivated enough to bring their full thinking — that is step three. Which step describes your decision rooms, honestly?
How much of your decision process is actually process, and how much is ritual? The real question is whether that process actively creates space for all six cognitive dimensions, or whether it simply formalises the dominant ones.
What would it take for your quietest, most cognitively different voice to lead a decision? Not as a thought experiment. As a genuine test of whether your leadership culture can unlock the thinking that sits outside its comfort zone.
What the technology cannot do
At Wizer, we map cognitive diversity. We score panel strength. We surface the people whose thinking is missing from a decision before it locks in. We give leaders an accurate picture of who is in the room and what they bring — because you cannot invite a perspective you have not mapped, and you cannot notice an absence.
None of it works without a leader who understands that their real job is not to make the call. It is to create the conditions where the best call can emerge from the full range of thinking in the room.
Dr. Bourke's book makes that case with more rigour and more humanity than anything else in the field of decision science. If you lead people — or advise those who do — read it.
Wizer is a decision intelligence platform that helps organisations see how decisions are being shaped — by thinking styles, experience, and blind spots. Learn more at wizer.business
