You look up the train tracks. An out-of-control trolley barrels down, hell-bent toward five people bound to the rails and unable to escape.

I recently thought a lot about this classic ethics thought experiment proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967. In Foot’s scenario, the track splits ahead, where you stand by a lever and have a choice to make: pull it and the trolley diverts to a side track where only one person is tied up. Do nothing and the trolley kills five people. Take action, and it kills one person but spares the other five.

Judith Jarvis Thomson later made the choice even harder by placing your friend on the side track. Would you pull the lever to save five anonymous people and let the trolley kill your friend, or save your friend and condemn the others?

There are many critiques of the experiment, including artificially limiting the number of choices. It forces a binary scenario to expose tensions in moral reasoning.

Stand with this problem long enough and something else becomes obvious: the whole setup is rigged. Only the mind of a psychopath who enjoys inflicting harm would create such a trap. No matter your choice, you harm people on the tracks and harm yourself with the consequences.

The only logical choice is to refuse to engage and neutralize the psychopath.

Decision-making Can’t Be Mastered by Reading

Making a decision is one of the hardest leadership skills to learn and apply. The fear centers more on dealing with the consequences and less on the decision itself. After all, inside your head a decision is already made. Carrying it forward is what paralyzes most people. The reluctance includes weighing being right or wrong, how the decision will be perceived, will you be liked or hated, just to name a few.

But those intangibles are not all. Practical constraints that need to be considered compound the pressure: budgets, deadlines, team composition, skills, and more.

Imagine you hired a Senior AI Engineer. In a discussion about multilingual features, the person claims that English and French are the same to an AI model, because words (tokens) are converted into numbers.

This is atrociously incorrect. It’s like comparing a symphony to a car alarm because both are sound waves. Never mind non-linear semantic spaces to account for words without direct equivalents (e.g., Procrastinate → remettre à plus tard, Retrouvailles → joyful reunion after a long separation).

You now face a serious situation and a difficult decision. Does the person’s claim disqualify them?

The person was hired as a senior professional yet lacks basic understanding of the foundations. Perhaps the person misrepresented their capabilities. The natural next question is: should you invest in developing the person despite the deception? This is similar to the decision to pull the lever on the train tracks, but this time you’re confronted with a real-world case. Also, this is far from a binary decision. Reality has other constraints that need consideration.

What are the consequences of keeping the person on the team and investing in their development? Would other team members take it as being okay to knowingly misrepresent, deceive, and provide wrong information? That instead of consequences, the person will be rewarded with further investment in professional development. What are the incentives you’re putting forward?

On the other hand, let the person go and you face short-term pain, recruitment cost, and the discomfort of being “the bad person.” No clean choice exists.

Decision-making is one of the hardest leadership skills, because you must own the decision and live with its consequences. The fear of deciding can be paralyzing. You may cope by running endless pros-and-cons analysis or rationalize that the status quo is acceptable, that a decision doesn’t need to be made. It feels safer, until it isn’t.

The Consequences of Indecision are Material

If you work for a large company, you may try to hide behind headcount, after all there are so many people employed at the company and surely others are underperforming. This is abdication of responsibility. Continue down that path and the company may prune you instead.

In small companies or as a business owner, indecision is unforgiving. Customers churn due to bad products and services. Cash runs out and the company may go out of business. A catastrophic result from a reluctance to decide. At some point you will need to ask yourself: Are you a leader or are you performing in a popularity contest?

Indecisions carry consequences for you and everyone on the team. They become collateral damage due to your refusal to lead. The fear of deciding is a bad decision in itself.

Performative Leadership

Posting platitudes and inspirational quotes on social media may attract clicks and likes, but don’t confuse it for leadership. Take them for what they really are: reality coping.

The same applies to scheduling self-serving meetings where you pontificate your virtues (e.g., AMA, fireside chats).

Management is measured by the output of the organization minus derived problems. If you think that sharing cliché quotes or Aesop-like fables will get the job done, reality has a check waiting for you to cash.

Consider these “inspiring” leaders:

1. Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos): Hyped revolutionary blood tests; raised billions. Tech failed; fraud conviction.
2. Kenneth Lay (Enron): Innovative energy giant image. Accounting fraud; company collapsed.
3. Martin Winterkorn (Volkswagen): Diesel tech leadership hype. Emissions scandal damaged brand.
4. Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX): Effective altruism/crypto innovation talks. Fraud; exchange collapse.
5. Billy McFarland (Fyre): Luxury festival visionary. Event disaster; fraud conviction.
6. Gerald Levin (Time Warner): New media convergence hype. AOL merger disaster.
7. Dick Fuld (Lehman Brothers): Bold Wall Street leadership. Risky bets led to bankruptcy.
8. Leo Apotheker (HP): Strategic vision promises. Short tenure with major value loss.
9. Bernard Ebbers (WorldCom): Growth-through-acquisition story. Accounting fraud and bankruptcy.
10. Alex Mashinsky (Celsius): Safe high-yield crypto promises. Platform froze assets and bankruptcy.

These are but a few famous names who mastered narratives while abandoning accountability. Many more charlatans and snake-oil salesmen flood social media with crappy content, feeding the algorithm and leaving no real impression.

How to Learn?

You learn decision-making the same way you learn any hard skill: deliberate practice on low-stakes calls. Ship the imperfect feature. Give the direct feedback. Each decision builds the muscle. Postponing only invites more problems. You are expected to lead, not to perform.

The modern obsession with safety and empathy has weaponized discomfort. Leaders who prioritize feelings over competence create organizations where truth becomes optional. Merit is not cruelty. Standards are not violence. Pretending otherwise produces performative theater instead of results.

Whichever decision you make, you signal to those around you what is permissible. Choose wisely and you strengthen the culture. Choose poorly and you multiply your problems manyfold.

Decision-making remains the hardest leadership skill to learn and the evergreen skill always in demand.