Decision Debt is the compounding cost of making decisions on a depleted mind. How it builds, what it looks like in a leadership team, and how it is cleared.

I regularly meet HR Directors who can explain, in detail, why a leader is experiencing symptoms of burnout. What they struggle to explain is why the strongest person on that leader's team handed in their notice six months before anyone saw it coming. Those two things are usually connected, and few organisations are looking at the link. Decision Debt is what happens when a leader keeps making calls while cognitively depleted, without the recovery to clear it. I've written abou

Middle managers are carrying more pressure than any other group in most organisations right now. They are also receiving the least targeted development in return. That gap has a name.

Seventy percent of senior leaders say they are making decisions while mentally overloaded. That figure comes from a 2025 UK leadership wellbeing report, and it will not surprise anyone who works closely with emerging and senior leaders. The exhaustion is visible. The calendar pressure is visible. What is not visible is what that depletion is actually doing to the quality of decisions being made day after day, week after week. This is what sits underneath the fatigue that lead