In the 1980s, Athens was battling crippling pollution. Smog sat over the city and congestion was spiralling.
Officials introduced what seemed like a perfectly sensible solution:
Cars with odd-numbered licence plates could drive on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered plates on even-numbered days.
For a short while, it worked. Traffic fell. Pollution dipped. Job done.
Until it wasn’t.
Within months, congestion crept back up and in some cases, it was higher than before. Air quality stalled. Then deteriorated.
The reason?
Many residents bought a second car with the opposite plate number so they could drive every day. These extra vehicles were often older and more polluting, so the policy ended up making conditions worse, not better.
A textbook case of unintended consequences: a decision that solves the problem in front of you while quietly creating bigger ones behind you.
It’s all to easy to do this when we run hard at a decision because the first-order logic makes perfect sense.
“We need more sales…”
“We need to move faster…”
“We need to motivate the team…”
But it’s rarely the first-order effect that hurts you.
It’s the second, third and fourth.
Push the sales team harder → discounts creep in → revenue climbs, margins collapse.
Rush a project out the door → everyone applauds the speed → then spend months fixing the avoidable issues.
Incentivise the wrong behaviour → the target gets hit → the point gets missed.
Bold leadership isn’t about moving quickly. It’s about thinking clearly before you move and finding ways to experiment and test before rolling decisions out.
It’s about slowing down long enough to ask the questions most people skip.
Don’t confuse this with perfectionism! Where we put decisions off forever and a day.
A simple tool I like to use is the pre-mortem:
“If this has failed six months from now, what will have caused it?”
It forces you to see the hidden traps before you step in them.
It gives your bold ideas the foundations they deserve.
And it shifts you from “charging in” to choosing wisely.
Pair that with my favourite double-question “Why?” and “Why not?” and you’re mapping out the future landscape and understanding the nuance that sits around each decision.
So the real invitation this week is simple:
Slow down. Look further ahead.
And give your decisions the chance to succeed all the way through and not just on day one.
What’s one decision you’re sitting with right now that deserves a pre-mortem?
Three Experiments for You to Try 🧪
🔍 The 2-Minute Experiment
Think of a decision you made in the last monththat felt obvious at the time. Now ask yourself: “Was there anything that happened afterward that I didn’t expect?”
See if you can spot one ripple - could be good or bad. This is how you train your eye for second-order effects.
🧠 The 5-Minute Experiment
Take a decision you’re working on. Spend five minutes listing three things that could go wrong that aren’t obvious yet. You’re not predicting the future, it’s about widening the lens.
Often the simple act of naming these possibilities sharpens your clarity.
🧭 The 15-Minute Experiment
Pick a live project and run a mini pre-mortem. Imagine it’s six months from now, and it hasn’t worked. Write down everything that caused it.
Then underline the one line that feels uncomfortably true. That might be a risk worth paying attention to this week.
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