1. Deciding Without Completeness · How to act when the picture stays incomplete
Why does a decision stay open when capable people sit at the table and the objectives seem clear? Often because we hope more information will solve the problem, while the situation keeps moving.
Through four situations from my career, from a missing child off the coast at Koksijde to a night-time evacuation in Pakistan, I show how waiting becomes a decision in itself, and how an organisation stalls when mandate and responsibility drift apart. Each situation comes with a recognisable example from organisational life.
You leave with two things. T-FORDEC, a decision framework from aviation that slows you down just enough not to act without thinking. And the difference between uncertainty about the situation and doubt that warns you: with the first you act, with the second you stop.
2. When it gets tense · Responsibility beyond role and title
In the military, it was always clear who held the mandate. Rank still doesn't predict how someone reacts when a situation tips: sometimes a person without any notable position takes the initiative, while the one with authority hesitates or clings to procedure.
This keynote is about that gap between what someone may do and what someone actually does. Through a Combat SAR briefing in Florennes, operational pressure at an aviation company in the Caribbean and the rescue at the Baltic Ace, I look at who keeps speaking when the room turns careful, how loyalty slowly turns into silence, and how mistakes get judged afterwards. I also look at where responsibility stops, because sometimes stopping or leaving is the last way to make that clear.
You leave with OSMEALQ, with the emphasis on its last letter: the question nobody had asked yet, and with the T-FORDEC briefing structure.
Position is granted. Behaviour emerges.