Decision Diagnostic
How do you decide in live situations?
This tool asks you to respond to ten situations from live operational environments. There are no right answers and no score. What you get at the end is a picture of how you read a situation, how you read risk and how you make decisions. You will see the results on screen and they will be emailed to you as well.
Answer as you actually respond, not as you think you should.
Where you will land
Your answers place you somewhere on this compass. It is built from three things: whether you read risk high or low, whether you act early or wait for certainty, and whether you check a decision with people or work it out alone.
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Before you start
Where should we send it?
Your result appears on screen the moment you finish. We email you a copy as well, so you still have it next week when you want to think about it again.
You have a quiet hour in your day to catch up. You have a screen of ops updates, a radio that springs to life with team updates, and a log that needs updating. A colleague starts telling you at length about a problem from yesterday.
Your decision signature
Where this is a strength
Where it costs you
Your results
Each scale is a tendency, not a mark. The middle is not the right answer, and neither end is the wrong one. What is important is understanding how those tendencies help you to make decisions.
Each scale is tagged to the frameworks underneath this tool: MBED, the Making Better Event Decisions Framework, which structures the decision itself, and LSJF, the Live Situational Judgement Framework, which is how you read a situation as it develops. LSJF runs in five stages, PULSE: Perceive, Understand, Locate, Synchronise and Enact.
What drives your decision making
These four factors are the things that influence your decision making. The longer the bar, the more that factor impacts on your decision-making.
is your strongest driver.
One combination worth naming. Experience is your strongest driver, and you also tend to check a decision by yourself. Together those make an unfamiliar situation the hardest thing for you to read, because the resource you rely on most is the one that is missing, and you are not drawing on anyone else's. The remedy is specific: ask the person nearest to you what they are seeing, before you decide rather than after.
One finding worth taking away. Decisions rarely fail in the emergency. They fail earlier, in the quiet period before it, when attention drops and the small changes that were building go unnoticed. By the time it is obvious to everyone, the useful options have already narrowed. Staying alert when nothing is happening is the skill, not reacting well when it does.
Where to take this
Here are some suggestions on how you could develop your decision-making capabilities further.
Decision-Making Under Pressure (opens in a new tab)
A one day programme on escalation clarity, role boundaries and communicating under pressure. Built for the gap between having the read and getting it said.
Live Simulation and Experiential Learning
Experience is built, not waited for. Simulation puts you through situations you have not met, in a real environment, with a structured debrief afterwards.
High-Performance Decision-Making Teams (opens in a new tab)
A three day intensive opening on decision load, bias, stress and fatigue, then team dynamics and escalation mapping. For people whose judgement is sound until the volume climbs.
High-Performance Decision-Making Teams (opens in a new tab)
Day two covers authority gradients and distributed decision-making: how a room is set up so the person holding the information is heard regardless of rank, and how a leader's own risk tolerance sets the team's.
The Show-Safe Suite (opens in a new tab)
Four levels, from Operations through Manager and Tactical to Strategic, built around event control and command decision-making. Everyone starts at Operations unless prior learning is recognised.
How that compares
Two of the situations you answered are taken from the original doctoral research, which put the same questions to 125 event professionals. Here is where your answer sits against theirs.
A significant failure emerges during your event, with the public already on site. What is your first action?
You chose
- Get more information on the problem
- Meet with the client or key stakeholders
- Brainstorm ideas with the team
- Call show-stop
- Contact your professional network of suppliers
- Call your insurers
In that situation, what is the top priority in your thinking?
You chose
- Level of safety risk
- Customer and attendee experience
- Resources and number of options available
- Time available
- Financial cost or risk of loss
- Information available
- External perceptions and reputational damage
The strongest finding in that research: experienced event professionals decided from the situation in front of them, not from their own attitude to risk. Which is worth holding on to when you read your profile above. It describes how you approached these situations, not a fixed personality you are stuck with.
One quick check
Before we save your result, Cloudflare checks that you are a person and not an automated script. It usually takes a moment, and it may ask you to tick a box.
On its wayThank you,
Your request to hear about the courses was not recorded either. When you email us, mention it and we will add you.
Want to do something with this?
Your result is on its way to . Bearing builds situational judgement capability for people who work in live operational environments, developed and honed through our training programmes. If you are interested in booking onto a course, discussing how we might be able to support you and your team or potentially more in depth research, tick the box below and explore more on our site.