Do you really need more perspectives from others to decide better?

Asking for more perspectives from others doesn't help you decide better.
Less cognitive noise does.

A leader wanted my perspective on a matter in our coaching sessions.
Her ADHD made decisions messy.

I knew her enough to know that she had the data, knowledge, skills and intelligence to make her own decision, even when she didn’t realise that in her.

She wasn't lacking decision making capability. She was experiencing cognitive noise.

When the headspace is crowded with competing thoughts, emotional spikes, urgency, and second-guessing, that noise blinds you from seeing your own ability to decide.

Others' perspectives wouldn't fix the decision. Less noise would.

What helped me help her was Dr. Thomas E. Brown's orchestra conductor metaphor for executive functioning:

Our brain is like a full orchestra.
Attention, memory, emotion, and action are the musicians.
Executive functioning is the conductor.

Even capable musicians produce noise without a steady conductor to cue, prioritise, and keep time.

Adding my perspective on top of everything she had already gathered would be like adding another musician to an already messy performance.

More instruments don't fix disorganisation. A stronger conductor does.

The conductor is often underpowered in certain conditions: high stress, low interest, emotional overload.

So we worked on strengthening the conductor:
🎶Filtering signal from noise
🎶Sequencing thoughts
🎶Regulating tempo
🎶Deciding what plays and what pauses

In practice, that means:
We separated facts from her emotions and perceptions of the matter in question. We pinpointed the real constraints, and we reorganised everything into one clean move forward.

And that move was much aligned with her individuality for her to sustain it effortlessly.

When the conductor stepped up, the orchestra performed.
No additional musician required.
No borrowed perspective needed.

Mine wasn't.

This is what I show up for alongside rising leaders with busy brains: not adding noise, but helping them find the conductor within.

Putting the conductor's baton back in their hands 😊.