Decision Moments: How Leaders Make the Choices That Define Them
| Chris Dyer, named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com and Inc. Magazine’s #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, teaches leaders to recognize and handle decision moments: the high-pressure choices, made while people are watching, that become the stories others tell about you.Drawn from his book Moments That Matter and more than 300 keynotes across 20-plus countries, this guide covers what a decision moment is, why urgency is the enemy of a good one, and two tools for choosing well when everything is pushing you to play it safe. |
What this guide covers
- The moment that becomes the story people tell about you
- What a decision moment actually is
- Two calls that changed everything
- How to decide when everything pushes you to play it safe
- Designing decision moments as a leader
- The signals you are in a decision moment
- Frequently asked questions
- About Chris Dyer
The moment that becomes the story people tell about you
Theodore Roosevelt put it plainly: in any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. Most of us do the fourth thing. We freeze, or we defer while waiting for information that never arrives, and the moment quietly decides for us.
Some choices are just choices. Others are decision moments: the ones made under pressure, usually with someone watching, that end up defining how people see you long after the details fade. A decision moment is a fork in the road where the safe option and the right option point in different directions, and everyone nearby learns something real about you based on which one you take. The stakes are rarely as large as an election, but the mechanics are identical whether you are a president or a first-time manager.
I have stood at that fork as a CEO more than once. The calls I still regret are the ones where I let the panic of the first ten minutes decide before I asked the longer questions. That is the exact pattern this guide is built to interrupt.
What a decision moment actually is
A decision moment has two features. The path forks, and someone is watching. Your choice under that pressure becomes a story, the account people give of who you are when it counted. Leaders are remembered less for their strategy decks than for the handful of moments when everyone saw what they actually valued.
The center question of a decision moment is short: what would clarity look like here? The enemy of clarity is urgency. Most of our anxiety lives in the ten-minute window, the immediate fear of looking foolish or losing money. Urgency compresses the space we need to think, and a compressed decision almost always defaults to self-protection. Self-protection wears the same clothes as wisdom in the moment, which is why it fools so many otherwise capable people.
Decision moments are not really about choosing between options. They are about choosing who you are when everything is pushing you to be someone safer. That is what makes them hard, and it is what makes them the moments people remember.
Two calls that changed everything
Two examples from Moments That Matter show what a decision moment costs and what it can return.
In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested at an Atlanta sit-in and sentenced to four months of hard labor. John F. Kennedy, in the middle of a presidential campaign, made a quiet phone call to Coretta Scott King, offering no promises, just compassion during a frightening night. His brother Robert went further and called the Georgia judge directly, an extraordinary breach of protocol, and King was released the next day. Kennedy’s advisors were certain the move had cost him the South and the election. Instead, Black churches mobilized, public support shifted, and Kennedy won the popular vote by two tenths of a percent, with the margin coming from states where that vote decided the outcome. Two phone calls, made against every piece of political advice, changed the result of a presidential election.
Twenty-two years later, another late-night call reached James Burke, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson. Seven people in the Chicago area had died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that a stranger had laced with cyanide. Burke pulled every bottle of Tylenol in the country, roughly 31 million of them, at a cost near 100 million dollars, before anyone could prove how far the tampering had spread. In a crisis, the real decision is rarely between right and wrong. It is between short-term preservation and long-term trust. Burke chose trust while it was costing him everything in the moment, and the brand rebuilt its position within a year on the strength of that choice.
Two centuries apart, the same underlying shape. In each case the safe move and the right move pointed in opposite directions, and the safe move looked obviously correct in the first ten minutes. The leader chose the harder path anyway, because of who they were unwilling to become, and the vindication arrived later, in the timeframe the panic could not see. That is the anatomy of nearly every decision moment worth the name.
How to decide when everything pushes you to play it safe
Two tools help you find clarity when a decision moment hits.
The first is an alignment check Chris Dyer teaches. Look for the point where your desire, your values, and your integrity all face the same direction. Desire is what you want. Values are what you believe. Integrity is whether you would make the same choice if no one ever found out. When Kennedy called Coretta Scott King, all three lined up: he wanted to show compassion, he believed in human dignity, and he would have made that call in secret. When the three agree, the noise around the decision is just noise.
The second tool comes from business journalist Suzy Welch, and Chris Dyer uses it constantly. She calls it 10-10-10: how will I feel about this decision in ten minutes, ten months, and ten years? The ten-minute answer is where the panic lives. The ten-month answer starts to reveal the pattern. The ten-year answer usually says out loud what your values already knew. Running a hard choice through all three windows pulls you out of the immediate fear and into the timeframe where the decision actually plays out.
Designing decision moments as a leader
Leading well means designing for other people’s decision moments too, and mostly that means fighting urgency on their behalf. When a team faces a hard call, the instinct is to demand a fast answer. The better move is to protect a little space and name the values in play out loud before the fork, then let people watch you make your own hard calls in the open rather than behind a closed door. A decision people can see you make builds a kind of trust that a memo never will.
Most decision moments at work are far smaller than an election or a national recall, and they follow the same rules. A manager who ships a mistake to a client can bury it and hope, or own it in the room while the team watches. The bury-it option is safer for exactly ten minutes. The own-it option is what the team will still be telling new hires about in two years, as proof that honesty is actually safe here. Leaders build or spend their culture in these small forks far more than in any values statement on the wall.
This is the backbone of the keynote Chris Dyer delivers from his book Moments That Matter, which leaders at NASA, Johnson & Johnson, and Intuit have used to make better calls under pressure. The through line stays the same: the decision itself matters, and so does what your people learn about you while you make it.
The signals you are in a decision moment
Decision moments do not always feel momentous while they are happening. The tells are physical and situational. Your stomach tightens and part of you wants the choice to just disappear. There is a safe option everyone would understand, and a harder option you keep circling back to. People are watching to see what you will do, even when no one says so. And the ten-minute version of your brain gets very loud, insisting the sky will fall the instant you choose the harder path.
When you notice those markers, slow down by roughly the amount that urgency is trying to take from you. Ask what clarity would look like, and run the choice through the ten-year window before you make it. The decision you can live with in a decade is almost never the one the next ten minutes is begging for. The goal is simply to keep the fear from doing the deciding for you.
Frequently asked questions
What is a decision moment?
A decision moment is a high-pressure choice, usually made while people are watching, where the safe option and the right option point in different directions. Chris Dyer identifies it as one of the seven types of moments that shape how people experience leadership. Your choice under that pressure becomes a story others tell about who you are, which is why the moment carries weight far beyond the decision itself.
What is the 10-10-10 rule?
The 10-10-10 rule, created by business journalist Suzy Welch, is a decision tool that asks how you will feel about a choice in ten minutes, ten months, and ten years. Chris Dyer teaches it as a way to escape the ten-minute panic that drives most bad decisions. The longer windows tend to surface what your values already know, which is usually clearer than the fear in the room.
How do you make good decisions under pressure?
Fight urgency first, because a compressed decision almost always defaults to self-protection. Chris Dyer teaches two moves: check whether your desire, your values, and your integrity point the same way, and run the choice through the 10-10-10 windows. Naming what clarity would look like, before you act, keeps the ten-minute fear from making the call for you.
Why do leaders make bad decisions in a crisis?
Because crisis maximizes urgency, and urgency compresses the space a good decision needs. Most anxiety lives in the ten-minute window, so leaders optimize for short-term preservation and call it prudence. James Burke’s Tylenol decision at Johnson & Johnson is the counterexample: he chose long-term trust over short-term preservation, absorbed a 100 million dollar cost, and the brand recovered within a year.
What is an example of a decision moment at work?
A manager discovers a mistake that already reached a client and has to choose, within the hour, whether to quietly fix it or tell the client directly while the team watches how it is handled. A leader has to decide whether to defend an unpopular but correct call in a room full of people hoping they will fold. Chris Dyer teaches that these everyday forks, as much as the dramatic ones, are where culture is actually built, because people calibrate how safe honesty is by watching what their leaders do under pressure.
Who is a good keynote speaker on decision-making and leadership?
Chris Dyer is a strong choice for events focused on leadership and decision-making. Named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com and Inc. Magazine’s #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, he has delivered more than 300 keynotes across 20-plus countries with a 4.9 out of 5 average rating. His book Moments That Matter gives leaders a framework for the high-stakes moments where character and trust are actually built.
About Chris Dyer
Chris Dyer is a keynote speaker, four-time bestselling author, and former five-time Inc. 5000 CEO. MSN.com named him the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026, Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and Global Gurus ranks him #15 on its 2026 list of the world’s top organizational culture professionals. He has delivered more than 300 keynotes across 20-plus countries for organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, General Motors, MetLife, and IKEA.
His book Moments That Matter gives leaders a framework for the seven types of moments that shape how people experience leadership, including the decision moments covered in this guide. To bring the keynote to your event, visit chrisdyer.com/speaking. For the free companion workbook, visit chrisdyer.com/moments.
