Online event
The cost of hesitation: the psychology of leading through change
Thursday 26 November at 11:00AM
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A webinar for CEOs and senior leaders on making confident decisions, building trust and leading effectively when certainty isn't an option.
What you’ll learn
- Understand why hesitation occurs once a leader correctly identifies a problem as complex, and why it is a natural process rather than a personal failing.
- Recognise patterned behaviour, the retreat to false certainty, and how it produces stalled decisions dressed up as caution.
- Understand how trust architecture allows a leader to act without full certainty while keeping their team engaged and aligned through the process.
Description
This webinar is for CEOs and senior leaders of £5m+ businesses who recognise a problem correctly, and then find themselves stuck on what to do about it. Hesitation at this point is usually read as a personal failing, and it matters because it's often the highest-cost moment in a change process, since from the outside it looks like nothing is happening. It is more often a natural process: a leader scanning a complex situation that has no single, immediate answer, and no simpler baseline waiting on the other side of it. Using a simple three-stage way of understanding how people respond to unresolved problems (Glance, Understanding, Concluding), participants will learn to recognise patterned behaviour and the retreat to false certainty, which produces stalled decisions dressed up as caution.The session reframes the goal from resolving uncertainty faster to acting well while it remains unresolved. It closes on trust architecture: what allows a leader to hold that discomfort without their team fragmenting, and how to keep a team energised and aligned through a genuinely uncertain period.
Speakers
Thomas Jepson-Lay
Organisational attunement advisor, Thomas Jepson-Lay
Thomas Jepson-Lay spent eighteen years in senior humanitarian leadership, latterly as Save the Children's Regional Humanitarian Director for East and Southern Africa. He now coaches and advises leaders and organisations working under sustained pressure and navigating uncertainty.
His leadership philosophy starts with values. He argues that identity lives in the values a person enacts and that the job is only the vehicle for them. He believes in power shared with others, the humility to recognise when leadership belongs closer to the context, and the honesty to accept and embrace things that are no-longer working. He is sceptical of the familiar being offered as certainty, which he calls managed decline, and holds that this time asks for urgent patience: acting with urgency while protecting the time to think.