Stepping into the fight

Under pressure, organisations tend to do one of two things: freeze, or go all out on everything at once. Both feel like leadership from the inside, and both usually cost more than they deliver. This article is about the alternative: small, deliberate gains, and the discipline of choosing what to stop.

Pinned

There's a moment everyone who has trained in close-quarters self-defence remembers: the first time you're taken down and pinned. If you haven't been there before, you get one of two instincts. Freeze, or go 100%. Both are bad options most of the time.

Getting comfortable with that proximity was always a big focus in our classes, because it goes against every instinct. Freeze, and you hand over the position entirely. Go at 100%, burning everything to escape in one burst, and you'll likely fail and have nothing left.

A good instructor teaches something smaller and less dramatic: 5% gains. A slightly better hip position. An inch of space. One adjustment that doesn't open you up to something worse. You keep making those small moves until you can get up and get out.

With years of training, the same pinned position feels completely different. The pressure is still on and the position hasn't changed, but the instincts have. The first reaction, the one that fires before conscious thought catches up, is already closer to the right answer. Same moment, two completely different responses. The difference is what's underneath the instinct.

Why experience doesn't always save you

Here's where it gets harder for leaders right now. The world isn't just fast, it's layered. Disruption doesn't arrive one thing at a time; it stacks, and it's complex in ways that don't resemble what came before.

So even leaders with real experience, whose instincts have been sharpened over years of pressure, can find those instincts don't match the shape of the new problem. What served you in the last crisis may not serve you in this one. That isn't a failure of experience. It's a signal that the old instinct needs to be checked, not just trusted.

What freeze looks like in an organisation

We rarely call it freezing. It's the meeting that keeps happening. The board paper that keeps resurfacing without a decision. The conversation avoided for another day. The same decision circled again and again: not enough information, too much risk, too much uncertainty to commit. So nothing moves.

Not deciding is still a decision. It just doesn't feel like one while you're inside it.

What fight looks like in an organisation

The opposite failure looks like commitment. It can even look like strong, decisive leadership.

Everything becomes urgent. Five projects become ten. You're responding to customers, team, board and managers all at once. Strategies stack on strategies: work programmes for every business unit, focus areas for every team, parallel projects on engagement, equity, sustainability and cultural capability. Each is genuinely important, and each pulls resource and attention in a slightly different direction.

Nobody is wrong to care about any of it, which is exactly what makes it so hard to stop. But you're no longer moving efficiently toward what you're trying to achieve. You're moving to stay ahead of the fires, and movement can feel like progress even when it isn't. That's the treadmill: getting anything done starts to feel like control, even while you drift from what you set out to do.

The actual skill

Good decisions under pressure rarely look dramatic. They look like the 5% gain: the small adjustment that improves your position without creating a bigger problem.

That's what pressure orientation is. Not reacting faster, and not simply becoming more resilient, but learning to recognise what pressure is pulling you toward so you can choose the next sound step instead, on your own terms.

Just as often, the skill isn't in what you choose to do but in what you choose not to. The harder question, which rarely gets asked, is: of everything we're pushing right now, what's the one thing that matters most to what we're trying to achieve in this chapter? Good decision-making under pressure is as much about what you stop as what you start.

Reflection

• Where in your organisation is an issue on repeat, circling without a decision?
• Where is the treadmill of "everything is urgent" running hardest?
• Underneath both: what's the one thing that matters most right now, and what's the next 5% step?

Experience doesn't remove pressure. It changes what pressure makes you notice, think and do.