Leading in the age of AI

What's the risk of getting it wrong?

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LEGAL EXPOSURE REPUTATIONAL DAMAGE LOSS OF TRUST OPERATIONAL DISRUPTION LEADERSHIP DISTRACTION
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Decisions about people, technology and neurodiverse teams are becoming more complex.

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New programme

Decid:R.live

Most organisations have plans. Few can make effective decisions under pressure.

Decid:R is a live, facilitated experience for leaders and teams managing complex situations, risk, people and pressure.

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A black image with the words decision making under pressure, Decid:R from Inclusivechange.co.uk

Introducing Decid:R - Decision Making Under Pressure

May 23, 20267 min read

Introducing DecidR, Powered by Inclusive Change

Why the decisions your leaders practise today could define your organisation's future

At Inclusive Change, I am best known for my work in neurodiversity. I help organisations build truly inclusive workplaces where every mind can contribute, lead, and thrive. That work remains at the heart of everything I do.

But behind the scenes, I have always done something else too.

For years, I have worked with leaders, executives, and teams on the harder, quieter challenges: how to lead under pressure, how to manage change when the ground is shifting, and most critically, how to make better decisions when the stakes are high and time is short.

Today, I am bringing that work into the open.

I am proud to introduce Decid:R, powered by Inclusive Change: a structured decision-making simulation platform designed to help your organisation rehearse the decisions you hope you never have to make.


The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Most organisations have plans. Business continuity plans. Crisis management frameworks. Incident response protocols. Risk registers. Governance structures.

And yet, when something goes wrong - a cyber attack, a regulatory crisis, a safeguarding failure, a supplier collapse, a reputational emergency - things fall apart.

Not because the plan was wrong. But because nobody rehearsed the decisions.

When a real incident unfolds, decisions get made by whoever happens to be in the room. The formal plan sits in a folder. The team reverts to instinct, hierarchy, and habit. Communication breaks down. Roles blur. People escalate too late, or act too fast. Groupthink takes hold. And the financial, reputational, and human cost compounds with every hour.

This is the leadership decision-making gap, and it sits at the heart of most organisational crises.

Research consistently shows that the difference between organisations that navigate crises well and those that don't is rarely about knowledge or resource. It's about how their people communicate, who owns the call, when they escalate, and how they recover after a wrong turn.

That gap is exactly what Decid:R is designed to close.


Why Me? Why Inclusive Change?

You might wonder: why is someone known for neurodiversity and inclusion launching a crisis decision-making platform?

The answer is that the two things are not as separate as they might appear.

My work in neurodiversity has always been about understanding how people think. How different cognitive styles process information under pressure, how communication patterns either unlock or suppress good decision-making, and how bias and hierarchy quietly steer the room when the stakes are highest.

Those same dynamics are at the core of every leadership failure I have ever seen in a crisis.

And alongside that public-facing work, I have spent years delivering leadership development, change management, and decision-making training and consultancy to organisations navigating genuinely difficult situations. That work has given me a deep understanding of what separates good decisions from costly ones, and what teams need to practise in order to perform when it matters.
Decid:R is the place where both bodies of work meet. It is not a generic simulation tool. It is built on a methodology shaped by real leadership, lived experience of decision making under pressure, years of change management experience, and a genuine understanding of how people behave, and sometimes fail, under pressure.


What is Decid:R?

Decid:R is a live, facilitated scenario platform that puts your leadership team through realistic, branching decision simulations, tracking the impact of every choice in real time.

In a 90-minute session, your team works through a live incident together. It might be a cyber attack. A safeguarding issue. A supply chain failure. A reputational crisis. A major operational outage.

As the situation unfolds, the team must work out:

  • How to communicate: inside the room, across the organisation, and outward to customers, regulators, and the press

  • Who owns each call, and where authority and escalation are genuinely unclear

  • When to act and when to pause, because under uncertainty, speed has a cost in both directions

  • How to weigh competing priorities: public trust, financial exposure, regulatory risk, operational continuity

  • How to brief upward, translating live and messy information into something a board can act on

  • How to recover after a wrong call, without freezing, blaming, or being hard on yourself

Every scenario branches into hundreds of possible paths. There is no single right answer. The debrief shows the path the team took, the paths they didn't, and where the reasoning started to drift or how the team worked under pressure.

The platform tracks live impact metrics across public trust, operational capacity, threat containment, and financial cost, and produces boardroom-ready outputs including branded reports, decision-trace debriefs, and auto-generated response runbooks.


The Six-Stage Decision Technique

At the core of every Decid:R session is a structured six-stage decision framework: the same approach used in high-pressure professional environments from healthcare to defence to law enforcement - which is where much of my ow experience lies.

This is not about teaching people what to decide. It is about building the habits, the language, and the muscle memory for how to decide, so that when a real incident hits, your team is not starting from scratch.

The framework surfaces the things that other training simulations ignores: cognitive bias, groupthink, who holds authority, and the cost of silence in a room where people assume someone else has it covered.


Who Is Decid:R For?

Decid:R is built for organisations that carry real risk, and for the people inside those organisations who would be in the room when something goes wrong.

That includes:

  • Executive and leadership teams who need to rehearse crisis decision-making before they face it for real

  • Operations and service delivery leads managing continuity and resilience across complex systems

  • Risk, compliance, and internal audit functions looking to stress-test governance and escalation processes

  • HR, people, and communications leads who shape how an organisation responds internally and externally

  • IT and security teams preparing for cyber incidents, outages, and data breaches

  • Business continuity and resilience specialists who know the plan exists and want to test whether their people can actually execute it

The platform covers 14 sectors, from healthcare and financial services to education, manufacturing, public sector, and third sector, with 27 ready-built scenarios and a build-your-own wizard for bespoke situations.

What Makes This Different?

There are plenty of tabletop exercises and crisis simulations in the market. Most are expensive, one-off, and run by external facilitators who leave at the end of the day.

Decid:R is different in three important ways.

First, it is designed to be repeated. The research on decision-making under pressure is unambiguous: you do not build capability from a single exercise. You build it from repeated, deliberate practice. There is a Bronze platform which gives organisations unlimited sessions for a flat annual fee, so teams can run it quarterly, onboard new leaders, and revisit the same scenario after making changes.

Second, it produces real outputs. Every session generates a decision-trace debrief, a financial exposure model, a NIST-aligned exercise report, and an auto-generated incident response runbook built from the actual decisions your team made in the room. These are not generic templates. They are artefacts your organisation can use, learn from, and operationalise.

Third, it is grounded in genuine expertise. Decid:R is powered by Inclusive Change, which means it carries the weight of real leadership consulting, change management experience, and a methodology shaped by decades of practice. The facilitated Silver and Gold packages bring our practitioners directly into the room.


The Business Case

The average cost of a cyber incident alone is £3.4 million, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024. Add reputational damage, regulatory penalties, leadership distraction, and staff attrition, and the cost of a poorly handled crisis extends far beyond the immediate incident.

A single traditional tabletop exercise typically costs between £8,000 and £20,000, and runs once.

The Decid:R Bronze platform costs £3,600 for 12 months of unlimited sessions across your entire organisation.

The maths are straightforward. The question is not whether your organisation can afford to rehearse its decision-making. It is whether it can afford not to.


How to Get Started

I also offer a 30-minute guided walkthrough with my team: real scenarios, your questions, no pressure.

I will give you access to a 3 day trial, no credit card, no pressure just try it out for 3 days completely free.

Or,
if you are ready to explore bespoke facilitation, a custom scenario delivered in person, or a Gold package with a domain expert in the room, I would love to talk. Visit our Decid:R Live Page or drop me an email [email protected]


AI and leadershiporganisational changeleadership trainingcrisis decision makingbusiness continuity trainingcrisis response
blog author image

Lucy Smith

Lucy is founder of Inclusive Change, supporting organisations to lead change, inclusion and neurodiversity more thoughtfully in fast-changing workplaces.

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