Exploring Decision-Making with Clients

A Practical Extension for Coaches and Consultants

Most practitioners will have experienced this.

A client who is capable, thoughtful and successful, yet repeatedly struggles to make or follow through on decisions.

The conversation is good. Insight is there. Yet something does not translate into effective action. In most cases, this is not about capability, motivation or even clarity of goals. It is about how decisions are formed.

Some clients move quickly but overlook risk. Others see risk clearly but hesitate to act. Some are driven by opportunity but struggle to commit.
Some visionaries rely on intuition but can find it difficult to articulate or defend their thinking.

These patterns are rarely visible at the surface level of conversation. Yet they shape outcomes consistently.

When decision-making is explored directly, a different picture often emerges.

The Decision Profile is a structured framework and psychometric instrument developed through applied work in business psychology. It is designed to make decision-making visible and discussable in a practical way.

It focuses on four core forces present in all decision-making: Risk, Opportunity, Decisiveness and Intuition.

Rather than positioning one approach as better than another, it helps clients understand their own pattern and how that pattern influences the way they act.

This changes the work from solving individual decisions… to helping clients understand and work with how they decide. For example, a coach working with a senior manager noticed a recurring theme. The client generated strong ideas and saw opportunities quickly, but decisions often stalled. Projects were started but not completed or delayed until momentum was lost.

Through working with the Decision Profile, it became clear that while Opportunity and Intuition were strong, Decisiveness was lower and Risk was experienced more as something to manage than something to engage with.

This gave the work a different focus.

Not “how do we make this decision?” but “how are we making decisions?”

From there, the client was able to recognise the pattern, make more deliberate trade-offs, and adjust how they moved from insight into action.

For coaches and consultants, this creates a practical way to extend and deepen existing work. It provides a way to:

For clients, the benefit is equally tangible.

Greater awareness of how they make decisions often leads to clearer choices, more conscious compromise, and improved follow-through.

While this can be valuable in one-to-one work, its impact often becomes even more apparent at team and organisational level.

Teams frequently struggle not because of lack of ability, but because their approaches to decision-making differ in unexamined ways. At organisational level, these patterns accumulate into a decision culture, saffecting pace, alignment and execution.

This creates the opportunity for practitioners to work with clients to develop and support internally delivered programmes, extending the impact beyond the individual into system-level engagements.

Several insight articles are available on the Decision Profile website, exploring different aspects of decision-making in practice. These provide further context for those who want to understand how these patterns play out across individuals, teams and organisations.

For those who choose to use it in their work, the Decision Profile is supported by online training and a dedicated practitioner portal for licensees. This enables the administration of individual and group profiles, with reporting that can be used directly with clients, teams and organisations.

If you would like to explore how the Decision Profile can support your work, please get in touch.

 

Martin Lyle

Senior Consultant

Thompson Dunn