Coordinate and act
Decide It on the Ground
Settle the hard calls and stop conditions in writing, while everyone is calm, before a risky effort starts.
Borrowed from NASA's practice of writing flight rules in advance, which set out what controllers will do if specific problems happen during a mission.
One session · An hour or more to set up · Anyone on the team can start it
Try this first
Agree and write two things before you start. What makes us stop, and who calls it.
Use it when
The hard calls keep getting made in the heat of the moment.
Skip it when
Use it on risky or fast-moving efforts where in-the-moment calls would be hard. Routine work does not need every contingency pre-decided.
How to introduce it
Before a risky or fast-moving effort, sit down while heads are clear and settle the contingencies. What makes us stop. When we escalate. Who decides. Write them down. Clear heads make these calls better than tired people in the middle of a crisis.
How to show up
Walk the team through the uncomfortable questions before the work starts, and get the answers written where everyone can see them. Push past the optimism. Naming the failure cases now is the whole value.
How long it takes
Thirty to sixty minutes of planning before a risky effort begins.
What makes it hard
Teams resist imagining failure before they begin, so it takes steering to get real contingencies rather than we'll handle it. Get it in writing, because verbal agreements evaporate under pressure.
What it looks like when it's working
When something goes wrong the team acts on the plan instead of arguing, and the stop conditions get used. A crisis that finds people improvising over who decides means the groundwork never happened.
How long until it sticks
A couple of efforts before pre-deciding contingencies becomes a natural first step rather than an afterthought.
How you know it stuck
The team asks for its stop condition and who calls it before anything risky.
The idea behind it
The worst moment to make a hard call is under pressure. Deciding in the calm is how you avoid deciding badly when it counts.
Where it comes from
NASA mission planning. Pre-agree the abort criteria and escalation triggers for a risky initiative while everyone is calm, not mid-crisis. Difficult contingencies are worked out and written down before the mission, so they're not being decided by an exhausted brain in the moment.
Why it matters for senior teams
It shapes direction and consequential decisions
Evidence
No reference link has been found for this move yet.
Also fits: Big calls are made by too few people, or for too short a time