Decisions, decisions -How mindset development can help business leaders perform better under pressure

By Martin Fairn, CEO at Gazing Red2Blue

Making decisions is a defining characteristic of us humans, indeed it’s a fundamental part of our every waking moment. Perhaps uniquely, humans analyse those decisions, engaging in abstract reasoning and imagining different outcomes. 

But every decision we make is defined by a heady mix of rational thought, emotions, beliefs, personality, memory, and experiences, so it’s perhaps no surprise that our choices are often less than perfect.

Decisions are fundamentally based on judgements, but we are, demonstrably, not very good at forming them – despite our best intentions our judgements are influenced by unconscious bias and are inconsistent, or ‘noisy’.

In simple terms, bias is a systematic error – judgements are consistently skewed one way. Noise is random variability in those judgements, given similar preconditions. Think of the spread of arrows on a target; bias is when all the arrows are located in one area; noise is when they are spread all around the target. 

In the modern workplace we are expected to make ‘good’ (informed, rational) decisions every day – taking into account inter alia corporate objectives, resource constraints, and customer expectations.

Whilst executive teams are typically burdened with making ‘big’ decisions (for example ones that impact the future direction of the business), those decisions, by definition, come with maximum pressure – the result of making them will have the most far-reaching impact.

As a result, you would hope that the executive team was best equipped to gather and juggle all the key information necessary to make the ‘best’ decision, and that their judgements were free from biases and immune to noise.

But let’s not forget; executives are human too (some may disagree). They are just as open to those all-too-human unconscious biases, and just as capable of being inconsistent.

So, can noise and biases be identified, controlled, and factored out, to improve judgements and therefore decision-making? And can the skill to do that be learned or is it innate?

In large part, awareness of the sources of bias means it can be quite easily factored out, but the impact of noise is more pernicious, and controlling it requires effort.

In this article we will discuss how mindset development, which has helped thousands of elite sportspeople, schoolchildren, can help business leaders make better decisions under pressure. 

All in the mind

Before discussing mindset, it’s important to locate it in the context of related terms and concepts, particularly mental health.

Mental health is best described as a point in time mental state. Good mental health means you can cope with the normal stresses of life; poor mental health means you may struggle with anxiety, depression, or other issues that impact daily lives.

Mindset can be defined as your belief system, or attitude, that shapes how you see yourself and the world. It influences how you react to success or failure, impacting motivation and confidence. Fundamentally, it dictates how you respond to life’s events.

A strong mindset can contribute positively to mental health.

Mindset development, at its core, is a model of attention control. 

Bias and Noise

Bias and noise significantly degrade judgements and decision-making, resulting in inaccurate and inconsistent outcomes. In recent decades, a wide range of unconscious biases have been identified that demonstrate just how poor we are at choosing rationally (or, on a darker note, how susceptible we are to being manipulated).

Kahneman (in his books Thinking Fast and Slow and Noise) documented a range of biases and introduced the idea of noise as an independent source of judgement error. Let’s look at some examples.

Take recency bias; when presented with two pieces of equally valid information, we are likely to give more weight to the piece we heard most recently, despite it objectively being no more valid than the older piece.

Another example is proximity bias, a particularly unpleasant variant whereby we tend to prefer people who are close by, often forming more favourable impressions of them. 

Yet others include loss aversion, where we feel losses more than equivalent gains – ultimately making us risk-averse; and the anchoring effect, where we over-rely on the first piece of information (the anchor) we hear. This famously manifests itself when you meet a car salesman.

Finally, perhaps most perniciously, there’s confirmation bias, the tendency to search for and favour information that confirms our existing beliefs.

The good news here is that awareness can help avoid such traps, but in the workplace you have to be open to actively looking for and recognising sources of bias.

Noise refers to the unwanted, unpredictable variability in decisions that you would expect (and hope) to be identical. 

For example, people with the same expertise and experience interpret information differently and come to different conclusions; and personal tastes, backgrounds, and associations can lead to different judgments.

Looked at from another angle, the same person can make different decisions at different times based on things like mood, time of day, and even the weather.

Awareness of these factors can help limit their impact, but that takes effort. Mindset development can create the mental toughness to navigate difficult decision-making, helping to avoid falling victim to bias and noise.  

Give me the tools

So, let’s look now at techniques and exercises you can apply that will help you make better decisions. Imagine you are faced with a time-critical decision that will have enormous bearing on the future of your company (say you have an offer from another, bigger company to buy you out – but there is a deadline close at hand when you must decide or the offer will be withdrawn). 

What could you do to clear you mind and make that rational, informed, decision? Here are some ideas:

Firstly, pause – focus on the present moment to avoid distracting thoughts about the future or things around you.

Secondly, if you start favouring one option, ask yourself why. Did you recently find evidence supporting that option?

Then, think of the longer-term. How will the decision you take seem in five years’ time?

Finally, consider what could happen. If things don’t go as you hope or plan, what will you do?

These are examples of actions that we recommend in our mindset development programme, Red2Blue.

A “red head” describes the reactive state familiar to anyone facing pressure: attention scattered, emotions rising, focus hijacked by worry or frustration. The “blue head” is calm, composed, and focused on what can be controlled.

Transitioning from red to blue is not about denying emotion but redirecting attention—a process that can be learned through simple techniques such as controlled breathing, reframing, or briefly pausing to “take a broader view of the situation.”

Control of attention is at the heart of the skill. Red2Blue gives you a language to recognise when you’ve gone red and tools to bring you back to blue. Whether on a sports pitch, in an exam hall, or in the boardroom, that self-awareness becomes the difference between panic and performance.

By teaching mindset development as a skill that can be learned, rather than a problem to be solved, you can influence your emotional state, not simply be a victim of circumstances or diagnosis.

In summary, mindset development is based on the idea that abilities can be learned and strengthened through dedication and effort. It encourages you to embrace challenges, power through setbacks, encourage feedback in order to learn, and see failure as an opportunity to improve. 

Mindset development techniques help you to achieve control over how you think, react and perform well when it matters, mastering the deliberate shift from the overview to the detail, regardless of who you are or what situation you’re in.

Other voices

Paul Simon, in The Boxer, perfectly captured confirmation bias – “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

As noted above, this confirmation bias means that most people search for evidence that corroborates what they want to believe, which is a disaster when it comes to making important decisions. Not least, it means we undervalue conflicting evidence.

However, holding doubts is emotionally stressful, making us feel uneasy. In response, we make quick, irrational decisions to get rid of that feeling. We feel momentarily better, but more often than not we make the wrong decision in our rush to a conclusion.

But doubt helps us make the most informed decisions, so keep it for as long as you need to gather and analyse evidence.

Conclusions

We are as a species far less in control of how we react to events than we would like to believe. We frequently make objectively awful choices, which can lead to individual or corporate disaster.

Those choices are based on flawed judgements, swayed by unconscious biases and subject to noise.

It almost goes without saying that making better business decisions leads to better outcomes, perhaps creating a competitive advantage for the organization or improving conditions for staff such that they are better motivated to contribute.

Developing your mindset is one way to better respond to events, forming better judgements and ultimately making better decisions. 

Mindset development can give you the skills to help you focus your attention, regain control over your thoughts, and help you make better decisions when it matters.

We can control only what we focus on.

Decisions, decisions. They have consequences.

About Gazing Red2Blue

Gazing is a leading global mindset development company that has, over the last 25 years, worked with elite teams and individual sportspeople, like the All Blacks, Ashley Giles and Abbi Pulling, education institutions like the Shaw Education Trust, and global businesses like AWS, Xerox and Diebold Nixdorf. 

Gazing provides mindset development based on its ‘Red2Blue’ principle. To put it simply, a person in ‘red’ is out of control, stressed and thinking unclearly. The transition to ‘blue’ means you’re calm, thinking logically and in control. 

Co-founder and CEO Martin Fairn has combined his knowledge gained from corporate roles and his sporting background to develop Gazing’s unique approach, which equips clients to perform well under pressure.

Gazing’s approach is based on the idea that mindset is a skill that can be learned, not a problem to solve.

Others that Gazing has helped include:

• International rugby players including Emily Scarratt, who famously secured England’s 2014 World Cup win with six minutes to go.
• World record breaking mountaineers including Adriana Brownlee, the youngest women ever to scale Earth’s 14 highest peaks,
• The British Army’s Gurkha regiment, widely recognised as one of the finest fighting forces on the planet.

To find out more visit https://gazing.com/red2blue/.

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