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Join for freePosted: Fri 21st Aug 2026
Think about a business decision you got wrong. When did you know it was wrong – when you made it, or only later?
In this Lunch and Learn, Walter Esser turns that question around.
Instead of judging decisions by what we know afterwards, he looks at what business owners can notice while the decision is still being made:
when pressure begins to narrow the picture
when useful disagreement turns into people defending their own corner
when a seemingly good decision deserves another look before the commitment is made
This isn't about adding another decision-making tool. It's about becoming better at recognising the moment when your own decision-making needs to slow down, open up or be challenged – while there is still time to do something about it.
Don’t confuse a bad outcome with a bad decision. Learn to separate what you knew when you made the call from what only became obvious afterwards
Notice when pressure starts changing the way you think. The danger isn’t always a lack of information – sometimes it’s what pressure makes you stop seeing
Know when to challenge your own decision before you commit. Recognise when to slow down, widen the picture or invite another perspective while there is still time to change course
Walter is an executive mentor and former CHRO who works with SME owners, managing directors and senior executives when leadership gets difficult.
For more than 45 years, he has worked inside and alongside businesses, from the shop floor to the boardroom, including 12 years as chief HR officer of Mitsubishi Electric Europe.
Today, his work focuses on sound judgement under pressure – particularly when information is incomplete, different perspectives point in different directions, and the final call cannot be delegated.
He challenges assumptions, tests certainty and helps leaders see what they may be missing before an important decision is made.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Walter Esser, who is an executive mentor. In this session, Walter will discuss how to become better at recognising the moment when your own decision-making needs to slow down, open up, or be challenged while there is still time to do something about it.
If you have any questions, please put them in the chat or in the Q&A as we go along. As always, this session will be recorded, and we will send the recording with further follow-up resources later today. So over to you, Walter.
Walter: Thank you, Beth. Welcome to everybody joining this session – I'm really pleased that you all made the time to come here on a Friday lunchtime during the holiday season.
Before I start, I want to say that I spent many years in big corporates. However, for the last six years, since the pandemic started, I've been working predominantly with small and medium-sized enterprises.
I've learned to appreciate the challenges these companies face. Small and medium-sized enterprises account for more than 98% of businesses and nearly half of the workforce in this country, and almost everywhere in Europe.
As the owner, general manager, or someone close to the decision-making level, you carry all the responsibility but don't normally have the resources of a big corporate. That can work to your disadvantage, but sometimes it may also work to your advantage, as I'll show you later. Now let me share my screen.
I apologise for this title, “Why smart business owners still make bad decisions”, because I hate “why” questions. Everybody talks about asking “why”, but I think the more interesting and more intelligent question is “how did it come to this?”
The point is, when you ask “why”, you're always asking for causality – a reason. And if you ask somebody for a reason, it can make them very defensive.
Let me start with a story – a football story. In the seventies, imagine a German cup final: two big clubs playing each other, and legendary footballer Günter Netzer sitting on the bench. The score was nil-nil, nothing had happened, and he could see his team running out of steam and out of ideas.
He wanted to do something about it, but he couldn't, because he was benched. Then, as one of his teammates signalled he needed to be taken off, injured, Netzer didn't even ask his coach – he ran onto the pitch, took the responsibility and played. He'd taken a decision.
But we don't know the outcome yet. I'll tell you what happened later.
Let me introduce an important distinction. We speak about “decision-making”, but I'd like to use the term “deciding” instead, because the decision is the result of a process – the deciding process.
During deciding, you gather, weigh, discuss and listen to information, and find alternatives. But it's also when you read the room around you – their mood, how close and well they are, and whether they identify with the problem.
The decision is the actual call: once made, it's hard to change. The outcome is what happens after the decision, and we're not in 100% control of that.
Think about events like the pandemic, or the global financial crisis from 2008 onwards. Many businesses suffered from decisions they hadn't taken, or from decisions whose outcomes turned out very differently than expected.
I bought a house in 2007 with a substantial mortgage, and by 2008 I wished I hadn't – but I have to live with the consequence. Was my decision wrong? No – I simply didn't know what was coming.
I'll give you an example from my recent practice. I worked with a company of 43 people in engineering, making customer-specific special machinery on a moderate scale.
One day, they received a big order from a new customer – more than double the size of anything they'd done before. The temptation was strong: “Yes, we'll take this.” But when they discussed it as a team, sales saw the opportunity, production saw the limits, and finance saw the financial exposure – and still, somebody had to make the call.
I worked for many years in the chemical industry, and there is always somebody who has to make the final call – somebody who is responsible.
You might hear people say, “We make all our decisions as a team.” That may be true, but somebody still has to approve it. In Japanese organisations, which I've worked with a lot, there's plenty of team discussion, but the CEO ultimately approves the final decision – even if they don't make it themselves, somebody still has to decide.
In that discussion with the leadership team, there was every psychological safety you could wish for. Nobody was silenced or excluded, nobody was playing games or sabotaging – they were all good, well-meaning people, and everybody gave their own opinion.
As the owner, you have to listen and think: are they talking me out of something I want, or into something I don't? At that point, you need to say, “hang on, I need some space here.”
That's why I'd like to introduce you to something I call the “deciding space” – some room, some liberty, to take the time you need to arrive at a good conclusion.
Let's do a little experiment – no sharing, just think for yourself for about a minute. Think of two decisions you've had to take, in your business or maybe in your life.
The first is one you felt completely certain about – it was easy to reach a conclusion and say, “that's what I'm going to do.” The second is one where you struggled through the process, moving from option A to option B to option C, with everything seeming right.
You didn't know what would happen. Think about these two situations, not about what happened afterwards or the outcome.
A decision is not the same as its outcome. Ideally it should be, but there are too many external factors you can't control.
So, what do you remember about how you felt, about your state of mind? What were you noticing specifically, and what were you no longer noticing?
Pressure changes attention. When you're in a situation where a decision is needed, there's pressure on you from various sides, and pressure always changes attention – it can create tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision robs you of options – the resourceful options you need for a good decision.
If you're not well trained in making decisions, you might want to close things very quickly – “let's do that”, speak to a colleague, and settle it. The other alternative is waiting for certainty: another piece of information, another survey, another voice, another consultant.
Now, with artificial intelligence available, you might think you can ask ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini, or Perplexity, pull it all together, and have your decision made. No – it doesn't work like that, because as the business owner, the final judgement rests with a human.
No machine can make a decision for you. It can narrow down the potential decisions, but it can't take the decision away from you.
Closing too quickly means rushing to get it over and done with. On the other hand, there's what we sometimes call “analysis paralysis” – looking deeper and deeper, asking for another voice.
It's tempting to go to a trusted colleague and ask, “Have you had a similar situation? What did you do?” and then to do exactly what they did. That can work, but not necessarily.
I learnt a proverb when I came to this country 26 years ago: a man never swims in the same river twice. The man is never the same man, and the water in the river is never the same water.
So whatever your colleague suggests, it might be a useful point of reference, but the ultimate decision is yours.
To be clear, I'm not telling you to distrust your judgement, your inner voice, or your gut feeling – some people have an incredibly good gut feeling. The point is not to distrust your judgement, but to notice what pressure is doing to you and to it.
When I say “widen the deciding space”, it means: pause, listen, look again. What else did I not see? Who else hasn't spoken who might have a point?
If you only have one option, that's a poor position – it gives you no room to move. Two options are much better, but they can also put you in a dilemma, which isn't necessarily the best decision-making space either.
So ask yourself, what would option C look like? I'm not asking you to consider countless options, but when you find yourself with only one option, or stuck in a dilemma, look to your team and ask them: “Can we find an option C?”
If you'd like to connect with me on Enterprise Nation or LinkedIn, and you're pondering a decision that's weighing heavily on you, get in touch – there's more time and space to talk it through there.
But my one message here is: challenge before commitment.
The outcome comes later. The quality of a decision belongs to the earlier moment – the deciding space. It rests on what you could possibly have known at the time: what was knowable, what was noticeable, and what you did before you committed.
Decision quality is not the same as outcome.
I'd now like to open this up for questions and a conversation. Beth, do we have some questions at this stage?
Beth: Yes, we've got a few questions. Is that the presentation? Would you like to go back to it, or should we do the Q&A now?
Walter: Let's do it now – we can always go back later.
Beth: Sure, okay, cool. So, what role does emotion or intuition play in good business decision-making? And when should we be suspicious of our instincts?
Walter: That's a fantastic question – it gives me the opportunity to say that emotions clearly play an important role in business.
The point where you should be suspicious of your hunches or gut feeling is when it starts to look like bias – for example, thinking “this is the same situation as last year, I feel uncomfortable about it, so let's not do it.”
I had a case a couple of weeks ago involving somebody who'd hired a salesperson three or four years earlier. He wasn't entirely happy about it, but the sales director said, “This guy knows everything – the competition, the market. I've had guys like him before, and I totally trust him.”
The sales director had an absolute positive bias, because this person reminded him of somebody else he'd known and trusted. The CEO wasn't happy about the decision but trusted the sales director anyway, and after three years it turned out the salesperson was, let's say, a rotten apple – he'd stolen company information and sold it to the competition, causing huge problems for the business.
It was never a strong enough case for a criminal investigation, but things were pointing in that direction. That's just one example – I could give you more, but I don't think we have much time. Does that answer the question?
Beth: Yes, I think so, absolutely. Okay, brilliant. So, what is the one decision-making habit you see successful business owners consistently doing well that others often overlook?
Walter: It's great that you ask about habits, because deciding is something you can train. I think one very important habit is training yourself in listening – not just to what people say, but how they say it.
How is the information conveyed? Do you sense conviction, competence, or perhaps a slight sense of manipulation?
The other part is: don't try to mind-read. Listen to the other person, then reflect back what you understood – “I understood you to say ABC, is that correct?” – and repeat until they confirm you've understood correctly.
Misunderstandings, or wrongly processed information, in the decision-making process can be very dangerous.
The next habit: some decisions do need to be taken quickly – if you're trading foreign currencies on a minute-by-minute market, for example, you don't have much time to think. But most business decisions give you far more time than that, so use it.
Viktor Frankl said that between a stimulus and a response, there's a small gap of time. To make your response as resourceful and good as possible, increase that gap rather than just reacting to the stimulus.
Get more information, analyse it, speak with people, and sometimes, simply sleep on it – take a night before you decide. Don't make decisions on a full stomach, or during your biological downtime.
These are just examples.
Beth: Thank you for that – next question. Is there a useful question you can ask yourself, immediately before making an important decision, to check whether pressure has distorted your thinking?
Walter: Good question. I think the most useful thing to ask is: is what I'm about to decide, about to sign off, in line with my personal ecology – with what I feel is right, with my values, with what we represent as a business?
Has it stood the test of time? Is it still valid after I've slept on it for a day or a night?
Some people tell me they don't have time, that they need to move quickly. But even the Japanese businesspeople I've worked with, faced with the most pressing decisions, will simply say, “I will consider” – and come back in a day or two, sometimes with more questions.
Even when your team is pushing you, or challenging your leadership, you don't need to prove your leadership by making a decision just to show you're the leader.
Beth: That's right, yes, absolutely – that's great, thank you. Okay, well, that's about all the questions we have time for. I have one more, if we've got time: if you took one idea from today's session and applied it to your next major business decision, what would you want that to be?
Walter: Okay, now let me pull up my last slide.
Beth: Great, okay.
Walter: Good decision: notice what matters while you can still do something about it. That's all in one sentence – is it enough for you?
Beth: It's simple, isn't it? But it's effective. I like it.
Walter: Beth, we said at the start that you'd give me 30 seconds to a minute to close, so I still owe you the answer to what happened with Günter Netzer and his hijacking of the pitch in that cup final.
He couldn't have known what would happen – running onto the pitch, he risked making a fool of himself. But he scored the winning goal.
I think he decided in an instant, but only because he was a proper professional who'd been one for many years. He could read the team, the energy on the pitch, and the energy of the opponent, and he knew: “I can do something about this, and if I don't, I'll feel worse for the rest of my life than if I go on and don't score.”
So he scored, and he was lucky. His decision was quick and had a fantastic outcome, but that's not guaranteed.
Whatever the outcome, don't fear it. Focus on the process of good deciding, and on staying in a positive state.
Increase the space between stimulus and response. Take your time, don't let anybody rush or manipulate you, and look at your values and your inner ecology.
Then take a deep breath and – as I sometimes say – throw your heart over the hurdle, and jump. Good luck with it.
Beth: That's great, thank you – thank you so much, Walter.
Walter: Thank you.
Beth: Yes, thank you for that presentation. To everyone on the call today, I've popped Walter's Enterprise Nation profile and LinkedIn profile in the chat, so please do get in touch with him if you have any more questions.
But as I mentioned at the start, we've recorded this session, so we'll send it out by email later today. Thank you very much again, Walter, and thank you to everyone for joining – I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Walter: Thank you. Bye now.
Beth: Thank you – bye-bye.
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