Leading With Imperfect Information

We noticed an interesting leadership trend in the World Cup. In the later knockout rounds, every press conference with the losing coach was brutal. News outlets from across the world would rake the coach over the coals for every action and every play that didn’t go the team’s way.

They questioned every decision, every strategy shift, everything that seemed to go wrong during the game. Our issue with this: is all of it was hindsight, delivered with 20/20 vision, after the outcome was already known.

Every action and decision that the coach made was in real time, when the outcome was still unknown.

As a leader, how do you hold both sides of that: making decisions with imperfect information, and living with the outcomes, even the ones that don’t go your way?

At Stoke Leadership, we value the Leadership Circle Profile® (LCP) for their insights and ability to break down behaviors, getting to the motivations behind them. And we think watching those high-level international coaches – and the press asking questions after a match – really highlights the differences between Reactive leadership and Creative leadership.

Judging decisions solely by their outcomes is a Reactive mindset. Evaluating decisions by the quality of the thinking, process, and available information is a Creative mindset.

Reactive Tendencies Demonstrated by the Media

The media's questioning reflects several Reactive leadership patterns.

Controlling

• Assumes there was a "right" answer that should have been obvious.
• Believes leaders should be able to predict outcomes with certainty.
• Focuses on finding mistakes and assigning blame.

Protecting

• Uses hindsight to reduce uncertainty.
• Criticizes decisions after the fact because it feels safer than acknowledging that complex situations rarely have perfect answers.

Complying

• Expects leaders to satisfy everyone's expectations.
• Judges leaders based on public approval rather than whether they made the best decision possible with the information available.

The Leadership Circle suggests these Reactive patterns often emerge from fear of failure, uncertainty, or appearing wrong. Brene Brown calls this “below the line thinking.”

What Creative Leadership Looks Like

A Creative leader would ask very different questions after the match.

Instead of:

• Why did you make that substitution?
• Why didn't you change formations earlier?
• Why didn't you play a different player?

They would ask:

• What information did you have at that moment?
• What alternatives did you consider?
• What assumptions proved correct?
• Which assumptions turned out to be wrong?
• What did you learn that will improve future decisions?

This shifts the conversation from blaming to learning.

The Decision vs. The Outcome

One of the biggest leadership lessons embedded in the Leadership Circle is separating decision quality from outcome quality.

Good decisions can produce poor outcomes. Poor decisions can produce good outcomes.

For example:

A coach may choose an aggressive strategy because:

• the opponent is vulnerable
• analytics support the move
• the team has practiced it
• players are healthy

If one unlucky bounce means a goal against the team, this changes the outcome, but that doesn't automatically make it a bad decision.

Likewise, a conservative strategy might accidentally succeed despite weak reasoning.

Creative leaders judge the decision-making process before they judge the result.

What Great Leaders Do

High-performing leaders like these top-tier international coaches, become increasingly comfortable with uncertainty.

They understand that leadership means:

• making decisions with incomplete information
• accepting calculated risk
• adapting as new information emerges
• learning without defensiveness

They don't expect perfection.

They expect continuous improvement.

As a leader, are you evaluating others based on what they knew at the time, or based on information that only became available afterward?

That question often changes the entire conversation.

A Leadership Lesson

The World Cup coaches facing their press illustrate a challenge leaders face every day in business. Managers launch products without knowing how customers will respond. Executives hire people without knowing exactly how they'll perform. Project leaders allocate budgets without knowing every future risk. No leader gets to make decisions with perfect information.

The true measure of leadership isn't whether every decision produces the desired outcome. It's whether leaders consistently make thoughtful, values-based decisions using the best information available, learn from the results, and improve over time.

That is the essence of Creative leadership: replacing hindsight criticism with curiosity, replacing blame with learning, and evaluating the quality of decisions—not just the scoreboard.