-- Most experienced professionals can remember a decision they would make differently today. What makes some of those moments difficult to explain is that the person often had the knowledge, experience, and training to make a better choice at the time.
Photo Credits: All About Headshots by Alissa Randall
Dr. Natalie Callis believes that gap deserves more attention. Instead of assuming that poor judgment means someone did not know better, she looks at what was happening around and within the person as the decision took shape.
"The decision is visible. The pressure that shaped it usually isn't," says Dr. Callis. That distinction is central to her work on human performance and judgment under pressure.
What Happened Before the Decision?
By the time an organization is discussing a questionable decision, the most important part of the process may already be over. People can see the action taken, but they cannot necessarily see the urgency, uncertainty, expectations, or competing demands present when the choice was made.
Dr. Callis calls this the "pressure moment." It is the period when a person is trying to interpret what is happening while also managing everything the situation is asking of them.
Consider an executive who notices a problem with a plan that senior leadership strongly supports. On an ordinary day, that executive may have no difficulty raising concerns, but doing so becomes more difficult when a deadline approaches and challenging the plan could delay an important project.
The executive has not forgotten how to exercise judgment. What has changed is the environment in which that judgment must be applied.
Good Judgment Can Become Harder to Reach
Dr. Callis makes an important distinction between losing judgment and losing access to it. She argues that pressure does not simply erase what an experienced person knows, but can make some of that knowledge harder to access and apply in the moment.
Urgency is one example. When something feels as though it must be resolved immediately, the quickest option can start to look more attractive than the most thoughtful one.
Authority can create another kind of pressure. Someone may recognize a concern yet become less willing to voice it when doing so means questioning a respected colleague, senior executive, coach, physician, or other person whose opinion carries weight.
Emotion, uncertainty, and consequences can influence the process in similar ways. They do not automatically lead to bad decisions, but they change the circumstances in which a person is trying to decide.
Sometimes People Already Know What to Do
When something goes wrong, additional training is one of the most familiar organizational responses. There are certainly situations where that is appropriate because the person genuinely lacked the knowledge or skill the situation required.
Dr. Callis is interested in the cases where the opposite is true. What if the person already knew what to do and had demonstrated that capability many times before?
That creates a different problem. Another course or another review of the procedure may reinforce existing knowledge, but it does not necessarily explain why the person could not use that knowledge effectively when the stakes changed.
This is where Dr. Callis believes organizations should become more precise about the difference between capability and access. A capability problem means something is missing, while an access problem means something the person already possesses became harder to use.
Confusing the two can lead organizations to keep teaching people lessons they have already learned. It can also leave the conditions that affected the original decision largely unexplored.
Ask Different Questions After Something Goes Wrong
Looking at the pressure moment does not mean excusing a poor decision. Accountability still matters, but understanding how the decision developed can make the response more useful.
Instead of asking only, "Why didn't you know better?" a leader might ask what felt most urgent at the time or which consequence the person was trying hardest to avoid. They might explore whether the individual felt able to question an assumption, whether competing priorities changed what received attention, or whether something about the environment made escalation more difficult.
Those conversations can reveal details that are easy to miss when the review begins and ends with the outcome. They can also help explain why the same person may repeatedly demonstrate excellent judgment and then struggle in a particular situation.
For Dr. Callis, those inconsistencies are worth studying rather than dismissing as isolated mistakes. They can provide clues about how a person's decision process changes when pressure increases.
Preparing for the Moment That Tests Judgment
This line of thinking is part of the broader Perform Under Pressure™ conversation that Dr. Callis is developing through LYQOR®. Her focus is not on teaching people how to avoid difficult moments, but on understanding what happens to human performance once those moments arrive.
That question can be applied in very different settings. A healthcare professional deciding whether to escalate a concern faces circumstances different from those of an executive considering a difficult business decision, just as an athlete responding to a mistake experiences a different form of pressure from someone overseeing an emerging technology. In emerging technology environments, this same thinking informs Human Intelligence Governance™, which examines the human judgment, accountability, oversight, and decision integrity involved when people govern intelligent systems.
What connects these situations is that capability must still be available when conditions become harder. Knowing what to do is valuable, but consequential environments also require people to reach for and use what they know while urgency, emotion, expectations, authority, or uncertainty compete for their attention.
That is why Dr. Callis believes organizations should look beyond the final decision when evaluating performance. The outcome tells us what someone did, while the pressure moment can tell us much more about why they made that decision.
About Dr. Natalie Callis
Dr. Natalie Callis, DNP, NEA-BC, is a PhD candidate and doctoral researcher examining human performance under pressure. She is the founder of LYQOR® and a Human Intelligence Strategist whose work examines human performance, judgment, and decision-making under pressure. With more than 25 years of experience in healthcare leadership and high-stakes environments, she develops research-informed frameworks that explore what happens internally when pressure begins to affect performance. Her work spans leadership, healthcare, sports, behavioral risk, education, and the governance of emerging technologies.
About LYQOR®
LYQOR® is the company and intellectual architecture behind Dr. Natalie Callis’ work on human performance and judgment under pressure. Its research-informed frameworks have applications across leadership, sports, artificial intelligence, behavioral risk, healthcare, education, and other consequential environments. Human Intelligence Governance™ extends this body of work to the human judgment, oversight, accountability, and decision integrity required to govern intelligent technologies responsibly.
Contact Info:
Name: Dr. Natalie Callis
Email: Send Email
Organization: Quintessential Consulting LLC
Website: https://thequintessentialconsultant.com
Release ID: 89202995
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