Decision-Making in Times of Disorder

This essay is based on a text published in May 2020, at the height of the disruption caused by the pandemic. At the time, the world was suspended: supply chains disrupted, mobility blocked, economies operating under radical uncertainty. It was in this context that McKinsey published Lessons from the generals: Decisive action amid the chaos of crisis, proposing a central idea — when the environment is no longer predictable, the quality of the decision begins to depend less on the available information and more on the architecture through which that information is transformed into action. ^[1].

Today, the context is different, but the nature of the problem has returned with similar intensity. The world is going through a phase of structural instability: active armed conflicts, a still incomplete restoration of the balance between powers, signs of discontinuity in the actions of the United States, tariff regimes that fragment global trade and a diffuse feeling of unpredictability that permeates markets, institutions and societies. We stopped experiencing episodes of instability and started operating within it. Uncertainty stopped being an episodic shock and became a basic condition.

That's why a text written in a pandemic context makes even more sense today. Because what he describes is not a specific crisis, but a recurring structure: the need to decide when the context does not offer guarantees. In environments like this, the traditional management model — based on extensive analysis, broad consensus and long validation cycles — begins to reveal its limits. The decision cannot wait for perfect clarity. It has to emerge within the ambiguity.

The article then proposes a relevant methodological deviation: observing how military structures operate under extreme pressure. Not to replicate models, but to understand principles. And the first of these principles is structural: instead of concentrating all functions in a single team, organisations must establish teams with specific, clearly delimited tasks, all at the service of a decision-making center that functions as command in times of crisis. ^[1].

This architecture involves distinguishing four essential functions. A function dedicated to the production of insight, responsible for collecting information, cross-referencing sources, testing hypotheses and transforming scattered data into actionable understanding. An operational function, oriented towards the concrete execution of decisions on the ground, ensuring continuity and immediate response. A planning function, focused on the future, that works on possible scenarios, anticipates developments and prepares decisions that are not yet necessary, but inevitable. It is a communication function, whose responsibility is to ensure internal and external coherence, avoiding narrative fragmentation at a time when the organisation most needs alignment ^[1].

The value of this division is not in the newness of the functions, but in their explicit separation. In many organisations, these dimensions coexist in a diffuse way, overlapping and competing with each other. In a crisis context, this ambiguity becomes dysfunctional. By clarifying roles, friction is reduced, speed is increased and, above all, the dilution of responsibility is eliminated. Each function knows what it is responsible for, and the decision maker receives organised inputs, instead of noise.

The model also has a decisive feature: it is modular. As the crisis evolves, additional teams may be established to respond to specific problems, bringing together diverse skills and disbanding when they are no longer needed. It is not about building heavy structures, but about creating adaptive capacity with a bias towards action ^[1].

The second dimension of the model is temporal. Under conditions of uncertainty, it becomes essential to separate the conduct of current operations from the planning of future ones. The natural tendency is to let the urgency absorb all the attention. But when this happens, the organisation resolves the present at the expense of the future. And, paradoxically, it also compromises the present itself, because it fails to frame its decisions within a broader horizon. ^[1].

The separation of these two dimensions allows us to operate with multiple time horizons simultaneously. The execution of this keeps the system functional; planning for the future prepares the system for what has not yet arrived. This division is not just organisational. It is an intellectual discipline. It forces us to recognize that the immediate and the strategic require different ways of thinking — and that confusing them is one of the main sources of error in a crisis context.

The third dimension of the model introduces an even more profound change: the way in which the crisis itself is conceptualized. Instead of being treated as an isolated event to which one reacts, the crisis is understood as a sequence of phases that unfold over time. The article proposes that the organisational response be guided by a strategic plan that follows this evolution, identifying, for each phase, plausible scenarios, critical decisions and associated actions ^[1].

This plan is not intended to predict the future accurately. It aims to reduce the impact of surprise. By structuring possible trajectories, the organisation gains the capacity for anticipation. Stop reacting only to what happens and start preparing yourself for what could happen. Uncertainty does not disappear, but it becomes navigable.

This way of thinking is particularly relevant in the current context, where instability does not appear in isolated moments, but in overlapping layers. Geopolitical tensions, economic disruptions and technological changes interact in a non-linear way. The challenge is not responding to one shock, but maintaining coherence across multiple successive shocks.

It is at this point that the text reveals its most demanding dimension. Despite proposing organisational structures, it implicitly points to something that no structure can replace: the quality of the decision maker. Under conditions of uncertainty, the decision ceases to be a purely analytical exercise and becomes an act of responsibility under imperfect information.

Making a decision involves accepting that not all data will be available, that not all consequences will be predictable and that inaction can be more dangerous than error. It also involves communicating clearly in a noisy environment and maintaining coherence when the pressure increases.

In stable environments, well-designed systems can compensate for individual weaknesses. In unstable environments, these weaknesses become visible. The decision stops being just technical and becomes an expression of character.

That is why this article, despite being written at a specific time, remains current. Because it does not teach how to avoid the crisis, but how to operate within it. In a world where instability has become structural, the quality of decisions emerges as the scarcest asset. And this quality does not just depend on information, but on the way this information is organised, interpreted and transformed into action.

The difference is not in knowing more.
It's about deciding better.

Golden Blue Notes
2BePro · Central Brain Trust · PIM Trifecta