Thinking clearly when everything is unclear

When people talk about decision-making, it’s usually described as something orderly. You look at the information, weigh things up, and decide. That’s not how it usually feels in real situations.

Most decisions I’ve seen — especially in public services — happen while something else is already unfolding. Information is partial. Time is tight. There’s often a sense that waiting too long carries its own risk, even if acting now doesn’t feel fully justified either.

In those moments, people aren’t trying to optimise. They’re trying to hold things together.

That mismatch between how decisions are described in theory and how they actually happen in practice is what pulled me towards behavioural science in the first place.

A familiar situation

There’s a kind of situation that comes up again and again in my work with the NHS England. You’re in a conversation with a service user where not everything is clear yet, but a response and intervention is still needed. The available information points in more than one direction. None of the options feel entirely safe, and doing nothing doesn’t feel neutral either.

What’s striking in these moments isn’t panic or poor thinking. It’s how quickly we start prioritising. Certain details suddenly feel important. Others drop away. Previous experiences — sometimes recent, sometimes much older — start to shape how the situation is read.

From the outside, these decisions can look inconsistent. From the inside, they usually feel deliberate, even if they’re uncomfortable. People are trying to decide what kind of risk they can live with.

What pressure actually does to thinking

Under pressure, thinking doesn't disappear, it changes.

When there’s a lot to process and not much time, people lean more heavily on experience and pattern recognition. That’s often described as bias, but in real settings it’s closer to triage. You’re deciding what deserves attention now, not what would be ideal to analyse given unlimited time.

Risk assessment in these situations isn’t a calculation. It’s a judgement. It’s shaped by urgency, by responsibility, and by the emotional weight of the decision itself. Two people can look at the same situation and reach different conclusions, not because one is irrational, but because they’re carrying different experiences of what it means to get it wrong.

As practitioners, we are taught that emotion isn't separate from Judgement- the scientific method demands non-bias. While emotion often gets framed as something that interferes with good decision-making. In practice, it’s part of how people orient themselves in uncertainty.

1. Stress tends to sharpen focus.

2. Anxiety draws attention to potential harm.

3. Confidence changes what feels possible to attempt.

When outcomes aren’t clear, people don’t just ask what’s likely to happen. They ask what would be hardest to deal with if it did. That question is rarely acknowledged in formal models, but it’s present in almost every real decision and mental health practise.

Where models start to feel thin

In Mental Health and psychological approaches, behavioural frameworks are useful. They help highlight patterns and reduce some kinds of avoidable harm. But they’re still simplifications that are peer reviewed.

In real systems, decisions are shaped by things that are hard to formalise — ethical responsibility, organisational pressure, time constraints, and the fact that consequences are often human rather than abstract.

Sometimes what looks like a “suboptimal” decision on paper is a reasonable response to a situation that doesn’t fit the model very well. Noticing where frameworks help — and where they stop helping — feels just as important as applying them.

What I’m working towards

I’m interested in how people make judgements when there isn’t a clean answer available. Not in trying to remove uncertainty, but in understanding how people navigate it, and how systems can either support or distort that process.

I don’t assume that better information automatically leads to better decisions. I’m more interested in how information is interpreted, how context shapes choice, and how responsibility changes the way risk is felt.

This site is a place to think through those questions in public — slowly, imperfectly, and with room to change my mind.