Diplomatic Dispatches
How to think when thinking becomes impossible.
There's a moment in The Fort - the gripping BBC podcast about a 2007 rescue mission in Afghanistan - where you realize something profound about human decision-making under pressure.
Picture this: British forces have just assaulted a heavily fortified Taliban stronghold called Jugroom Fort. The firefight was brutal. When the dust settles and they're forced to withdraw, they discover Lance Corporal Mathew Ford is missing - left behind in what the soldiers call "the killing ground."
Back at base, the decision is instant: "We're going back to get him."
The Marines conceive a hasty plan – essentially going back the same way they left. In tactical terms hugely risky.
But then Apache pilot Tom O'Malley proposes an outrageously audacious alternative plan: fly in at speed with four armed volunteers clinging to the Apaches' wings, grab Mathew, and fly him out from under the enemy's noses.
Fuel is low. The clock is ticking. Tom needs a decision immediately.
Listening to those soldiers tell their story - many speaking for the first time - brought me right back to my officer training. Not because I ever faced combat (I didn't), but because of how they made decisions under unimaginable pressure. The frameworks they used. The way they stayed functional when everything was falling apart.
You see, there's something we misunderstand about crisis leadership. We think it's about having nerves of steel or being naturally cool under pressure. But that's not it at all.
The Autopilot Problem
In moments of extreme stress, your brain doesn't work the same way.
The prefrontal cortex - the sophisticated part that handles complex thinking - essentially goes offline. You start running on autopilot. And if you haven't trained the right autopilot responses, you're in trouble.
The British Army understands this in a way that most leadership training completely misses. Their training is as psychological as it is physical. They deliberately push soldiers past the point where conscious thought is reliable, then train their subconscious minds to execute the right procedures automatically.
It's brilliant, when you think about it. They're not trying to prevent the stress response - that's impossible.
They're programming what happens when it kicks in. The system is less about military tactics than rewiring how human beings think when thinking becomes nearly impossible.
The Bomb
I learned this the hard way one September night in 2008.
It was 3 AM and I was in the passenger seat of an embassy vehicle racing across Islamabad into the diplomatic compound; driving the wrong way down streets, up on pavements that kind of thing. The Marriott Hotel had just been bombed and the whole sky was ablaze. And I was on the phone to my colleague in charge of security.
He was not in a good way.
His words were tumbling over each other. Completely unintelligible. Breathing fast and shallow. Classic panic mode. He was cycling through the same fragments of information again and again, unable to move forward.
As much as I sympathised I needed him to focus on what we actually needed to do: initiate the emergency telephone tree, confirm our people were safe, contact London, assemble the initial response team, locate British nationals.
But first, I had to get him out of fight-or-flight mode.
So I did something that probably seemed insane in the moment: I made him slow down.
The Seven Questions
What I walked him through that night was something the army calls the Combat Estimate - a structured way of thinking through chaos using seven specific questions:
The 7
Questions
(Combat Estimate)
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- What is the situation and how does it affect me?
- What have I been told to do and why?
- What effects to I need to achieve?
- Where can I best accomplish each action?
- What resources do I need?
- When and where do these actions take place in relation to each other?
- What control measures do I need to impose?
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Now, this might sound bureaucratic. But when your brain is flooded with stress hormones, these questions do something remarkable.
They force you to separate facts from fears, problems from symptoms.
They make you think when thinking feels impossible.
As I walked my colleague through the questions, something shifted. His breathing slowed. His thinking cleared. The crisis became manageable.
Not because the situation had changed - the hotel was still bombed, people were still injured, chaos was still unfolding. But because we had a process for making sense of it.
The Product Recall
Let me give you a different example.
A client calls me on a Friday afternoon. Their biggest product line has just been recalled. By Monday morning, their inbox is a minefield of angry customers and circling journalists.
The CEO's first instinct? "Get the lawyers on the phone. Draft a statement. We need to defend ourselves."
Classic panic response: protect the company first, ask questions later.
But when we worked through a customised version of the 7 Questions, something interesting emerged. What we actually had wasn't just bad headlines - it was 50,000 customers who felt betrayed and unsafe.
This wasn't about managing a media narrative. It was about rebuilding trust with real people.
The plan that emerged was counterintuitive: customers first, media second. Complete transparency. Direct communication before any public statements.
Which brings us to the second part of the system.
The Reality Check
This is where most crisis leadership advice stops:
"Make a plan, execute the plan."
But the military knows something business schools miss: execution is just the beginning.
Once you make the plan you then are trained to take a CONDOR moment.
Now, nobody can agree where the name comes from - majestic condors surveying battlefields, a Falklands radio call sign, or a wonderfully bonkers1980s cigar advert where a bloke contemplatively smokes while chaos unfolds around him.
Honestly? I love that nobody knows. The origin doesn't matter - what matters is what it does.
The CONDOR moment forces you to step back and assess whether your plan is actually working.
Not whether you're executing it properly, but whether execution itself is delivering results.
The
CONDOR
Assessment
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Consider what's actually happening (not what should be happening)
Options for your next move
Now decide
Deliver your decision
Observe the effect
React accordingly
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Back to our product recall crisis. We executed the plan: customers first.
But after 48 hours, we took a CONDOR moment. Customer response was positive, but media narrative was spinning out of control. We needed to course-correct: add proactive media engagement while maintaining customer priority.
The result? What could have been a reputation disaster became a case study in customer service excellence.
The CONDOR moment is panic-proofing for your decision-making. It's the difference between rigid adherence to a failing plan and chaotic abandonment of strategy altogether.
The Paradox
Here's what's counterintuitive about crisis leadership: conventional wisdom says it's about quick thinking and fast action.
But what I learned from the Army is exactly the opposite.
The leaders who thrive in crisis aren't the ones who think fastest. They're the ones who can force themselves to think clearly when clear thinking seems impossible.
Most of the time, you're not solving a crisis. You're solving your reaction to the crisis.
Your primitive brain doesn't distinguish between physical and psychological threats. An angry email triggers the same fight-or-flight response as an actual predator. That response says "act now, think later."
But in the modern world, "act now, think later" is usually exactly wrong.
The 7 Questions and CONDOR moments aren't just decision-making tools. They're nervous system regulators that give your prefrontal cortex something to hang onto when stress and panic tries to shut it down.
The System
What saved those soldiers in Afghanistan, what got my colleague through that bombing, what turned a product recall into a success story - it's having a system that works when your natural abilities fail you.
7 Questions → Plan → Execute → CONDOR moment → Course correct if necessary.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. But the process of planning and checking whether it's working absolutely does.
The next time crisis hits, try this: Before doing anything else, work through those seven questions. Create your plan. Execute for a defined period. Take a CONDOR moment. Course-correct if necessary.
Not because it's guaranteed to work, but because it's better than the alternative: running on autopilot with the wrong programming.
The leaders who survive crisis aren't superhuman.
They just have better tools for thinking when thinking gets hard.
