Why You Need to Explain Your Thinking (Even When Nobody’s Asking)

I often talk about the importance of being able to justify and explain our decisions, and I often get the same pushback: “No senior leader has ever asked me to explain my decision-making process.”

That’s rather the point.

The call isn’t for you to prepare for some hypothetical interrogation from the C-suite. It’s for you and your colleagues to regularly challenge each other’s thinking before it becomes a problem someone else has to ask about. Without that internal rigour, we slip into the comfortable assumption that our decisions are good ones; and when something doesn’t work, we blame mysterious external factors rather than examining our own process.

This thinking is dangerous to our careers and to how our profession is perceived. We must create environments where non-optimal decisions are expected, not treated as personal failures. Regular internal challenge is how we catch these before they spiral.

The other side is preparedness. At some point, someone will ask. Perhaps things have gone brilliantly, and they want to replicate it, but you can’t explain how you got there. Or things have gone badly, and your ability to articulate your thinking is the difference between being seen as a constructive partner and being shown the door.

So how do we talk about the science without sounding like we’re reading from a textbook?

Skip “the science tells us” and reach for something human. When explaining nudge theory, for instance, don’t cite Thaler and Sunstein directly. Talk about the flies etched into urinals at Amsterdam airport, and how giving people something to aim at reduced spillage by 80%. That’s a story everyone in the room will understand, whether or not they’ve read a paper on behavioural economics.

This approach communicates ideas clearly and builds credibility. When you’re pitching for resources and can say, “We’ve considered the behavioural economics behind this” or “Here’s how we’re accounting for how our people’s brains are wired,” you become harder to dismiss. That’s a far cry from “We really like this one” or, my personal least favourite, “The NPS is through the roof!”

The language we use either builds or erodes organisational trust. And that trust, earned through demonstrated expertise, is what gets us the resources and partnerships we need to do our best work.