Year-end reflections: A simple tool for brave teams and courageous leaders

Recognising the courage we already carry

Why bravery, clarity and connection matter more than ever

We all carry gifts worth sharing - not just at Christmas, but throughout the year.

For me, that gift is helping people recognise the courage, creativity, ideas, and value they already hold. Their capability to make smart decisions.

Qualities often underestimated, yet essential if individuals, teams, and organisations are to grow, adapt, and thrive in times of change.

Courage and bravery are not exceptional traits reserved for a few. They are human capacities. And when pressure increases - whether through uncertainty, transformation, or complexity - recognising these capacities in ourselves and in one another becomes vital.

Reflecting on courage in leadership and teams

As the year draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the leaders, teams, and organisations I’ve supported over the past twelve months.

Across sectors and roles, a consistent pattern emerges: meaningful progress rarely comes from grand gestures or heroic moments. It comes from small, intentional decisions - moments where people choose to act with clarity, integrity, and quiet courage.

Together, we’ve used data-informed insight, research and lived experience to:

• develop more sustainable habits

• build confidence grounded in evidence

• shape behaviours that support trust and performance

• move towards ambitions that once felt both daunting and out of reach

These shifts don’t happen overnight. They happen when people feel safe enough to reflect, learn, and act with intention.

The return on investment of brave work

This work delivers measurable results - improved performance, clearer decision-making, stronger collaboration.

But it also returns something far more significant.

Brave teams and courageous leaders report greater purpose, meaning, and well-being. They are not only achieving outcomes - they are more engaged, healthier, and more motivated, because their work aligns with who they are and what they value.

When courage is treated as a practice rather than a personality trait, it becomes a shared capability - one that supports resilience, creativity, and long-term success.

Why simple practices create meaningful change

One of the strongest lessons from this year is that the most impactful practices are often the simplest.

Change rarely begins with sweeping transformation. More often, it starts with a single decision:

• to pause rather than rush

• to reflect rather than react

• to take one small action that creates meaning

These moments of reflection help individuals and teams make sense of what they’ve experienced, turning activity into learning, and effort into insight.

A simple reflection practice for clarity, confidence and courage

With this in mind, I’m sharing a simple Braver Reflections practice from within the Be Braver® toolkit designed to support both personal growth and team learning.

4 Core Foundational Pillars

8 critical practices for living courage and leading braver teams

The questions invite reflection across four essential areas:

• Clarity — understanding what mattered and why

• Confidence — recognising growth, competence, and belief

• Connection — strengthening relationships and shared purpose

• Courage — naming the decisions and actions that shaped progress

Used individually or collectively, this practice creates space to pause, learn, and carry forward what truly matters into the year ahead.

Because courage doesn’t always look loud or dramatic.

Often, it begins quietly - with the decision to notice what is already there.

The Missing Humans in Decision Making

The Missing Humans in Decision-Making

In the rush to quantify, regulate, and automate decision-making, we risk missing the invisible human factors that actually shape outcomes. Numbers alone can’t capture the full picture. Culture, human risk, trust, and courage, that which is often unseen can often make the difference.

What happens in our internal worlds, influences how we interpret and respond to that which happens in our external worlds.

Making the Invisible Visible

At the London School of Economics last week, I heard senior regulators and supervisors debate culture in the financial sector. Governors, central bankers, regulators.

The conversation was robust, technical, and deeply important. With the leaders who make decisions that affect us all. The topic ‘Culture in the financial sector’. How refreshing.

And yet, I was struck mostly by what wasn’t said.

There was no mention of neuroscience.
No mention of psychological safety.
No reference to human blind spots.
Bias was discussed - but only in the context of AI, not people.

Distracted by who wasn’t invited to the discussion.

These omissions matter. Ironically. one could say they are visible blind spots.

Because the greatest risks in governance don’t come from algorithms.

I’ve worked a lot delivering leadership programmes for governance professional and coached many. Risks come from humans failing to see, name, or voice the truths that matter most.

When governance aligns with how the brain functions best, boards make sharper decisions, hold healthier debates, and deliver more resilient outcomes.

The Data We Keep Ignoring

The GAABS Workplace Decision-Making report is a sobering read:

• 46% of leaders lack clarity on the process.

• 35% equate good outcomes with good decisions.

• 91% think they are above average in decision-making, while 85% have never had formal training.

Confidence is high. Competence is low. And when leaders conflate outcomes with process, they create false learning loops -  reinforcing luck and overlooking blind spots.

Boards fare little better. The Boardroom Decision-Making Effectiveness Index 2025 shows:

• Only 44% of directors feel psychologically safe.

• Just 24% feel safe to challenge decisions.

• Yet boards with high safety are three times more effective in strategy, culture, and governance.

The message is clear: decision-making quality is undermined by overconfidence, poor process clarity, and unsafe cultures. The data confirms what many of us know intuitively: without trust, respect, and courage, boards default to silence, lobbying, and groupthink.

This data legitimises a point in the language of boards. Because many board directors have little experience or literacy in this terrain. Human skills. They often won’t invest in it unless the numbers back it up.

What We’re Missing

We are in danger of missing the humans.

Decision-making isn’t purely rational. It isn’t all numbers, models, and predictable probabilities. Risk management may be the discipline, but it unfolds in environments where humans operate - and humans are messy, unpredictable, and often blind to their own internal judgments.

It cannot all be seen. Neuroscience shows that under perceived threat, the brain’s prefrontal cortex - responsible for reasoning and judgment - shuts down. Psychological safety keeps the brain open, enabling innovation, problem-solving, and foresight.

But safety alone is not enough. Culture creates the space - courage fills it.

Without courageous decision-making, psychological safety risks becoming a talking shop rather than a performance driver. It takes courage for directors to voice dissent, for executives to surface early warning signals, and for regulators to acknowledge when culture, not compliance, is the deeper threat.

The Golden Thread of Courage

Courage is the thread that runs through every effective decision where uncertainty and human risk are present. Psychological safety may open the door, but it is courageous decision-making that walks us through it.

• Courage to surface blind spots.

• Courage to prioritise ethics over economics.

• Courage to create cultures where ambiguity is debated, not silenced.

• Courage as a discipline, not a personality trait.

Without courage, psychological safety risks becoming a talking shop. With it, psychological safety lays the foundation. Courageous decision-making builds the structure.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity

I don’t claim to have fixed answers here - only reflections as I sit with what I’ve been reading, researching, and listening to. But I do have answers for making the invisible dimensions of human decision making visible. To improve outcomes and culture.

A striking question at the LSE event left me wanting to stand and applaud, came from a psychologist. The question was trying to introduce ethics into the debate, but the response reframed it back into economics - precisely the blind spot I believe we must challenge

That misses something vital.

• Risk
  Machines are brilliant at calculating probabilities. But humans bring something else: moral weight. A 5% chance of economic contraction is not the same as a 5% chance of mass loss of life. During COVID-19, Jacinda Ardern chose to prioritise lives over GDP. That was not a calculation a machine could make - it was a values-based, courageous decision.

• Uncertainty
  Here, no model gives clarity. What matters is whether leaders can look one another in the eye in the storm and say: we don’t know, but we will act together. Trust and psychological safety are what allow boards and governments to make uncertain calls without paralysis or bravado.

• Ambiguity
  This is where human judgment is most irreplaceable. When the very nature of the threat is unclear, efficiency won’t save us. We need dialogue, diversity of thought, and ethical discernment. Ambiguity requires cultures where dissent is welcomed and moral trade-offs can be openly debated.

And yet, humans are also our own enemy here. We are prone to optimism bias in risk, to freezing in uncertainty, and to silence or hierarchy in ambiguity. The paradox is that we can add what machines lack - trust, courage, ethics - but only if we have leaders courageous enough to create the conditions that surface them rather than bury them.

From Oversight to Foresight

The Boardroom Index notes that high-performing boards engage in scenario planning, surface ethical dilemmas early, and steward culture with accountability. These are not technical achievements. They are human ones.

GAABS shows us that leaders often overestimate their decision-making skill. The Boardroom Index shows us that boards underestimate the importance of psychological safety. And the LSE event showed me how even regulators can overlook the human blind spots driving systemic risk.

Together, they highlight a critical truth: risk management is not just technical. It is cultural and psychological.

The Courageous Decision Agenda

So what must leaders and boards do?

• Make the invisible visible

  Treat silence, fear, and overconfidence as risk signals, not background noise.

• Embed psychological safety

  Not as a soft ideal, but as a governance KPI.

• Reframe decision quality

  Judge by process (values, ethics, bias-awareness), not outcome.

• Train courage as a discipline

  Through decision workouts, structured feedback, and reflection loops.

• Name hidden risks

  Status, power dynamics, alienation, chaos - these are not soft issues but material risks to decision quality.

The Human Advantage

Risk isn’t reduced by data alone. It’s reduced when humans make courageous decisions in cultures that allow truth to be spoken.

Psychological safety is the diagnosis. Courageous decision-making is the prescription..

If boards and leaders want to steward their organisations through uncertainty, growth, and disruption, they must go beyond culture change. They must build a new discipline: one where courage, ethics, and human risk awareness are treated as seriously as financial oversight.

That is the Be Braver promise.
Not simply “better culture.”
Not only “braver leaders.”

Not simply a cultural diagnosis. We prescribe courage.

But a pioneering framework for courageous decision-making - to be published soon - fit for the risks of our time.