An apocryphal story I came across last week…
During British rule in India, officials in Delhi were desperate to reduce the number of venomous cobras slithering around the city. Their solution seemed perfectly sensible: offer a bounty for every dead snake.
For a while, it looked like a triumph. Cobra numbers were falling. Rewards were being claimed. Job done.
Until… the claims suddenly skyrocketed.
It turned out that enterprising locals had started breeding cobras purely so they could kill them and collect the reward. When the government cancelled the scheme, the breeders simply released their now-worthless snakes. Delhi was left with more cobras than when the whole thing began.
Whilst it would be an amazing story if it were true, it’s a lovely way to highlight the law of unintended consequences. That’s when the action you take solves the problem in front of you, but quietly creates even bigger ones down the line.
It’s all too easy to do this when we run hard at a decision because the first-order logic makes perfect sense.
“We need more sales…”
“We need to move faster…”
“We need to motivate the team…”
But it’s rarely the first-order effect that hurts you.
It’s the second, third and fourth.
Push the sales team harder → discounts creep in → revenue climbs, margins collapse.
Rush a project out the door → everyone applauds the speed → then spend months fixing the avoidable issues.
Incentivise the wrong behaviour → the target gets hit → the point gets missed.
Bold leadership isn’t about moving quickly. It’s about thinking clearly before you move and finding ways to experiment and test before rolling decisions out.
It’s about slowing down long enough to ask the questions most people skip.
Don’t confuse this with perfectionism! Where we put decisions off forever and a day.
A simple tool I like to use is the pre-mortem:
“If this has failed six months from now, what will have caused it?”
It forces you to see the hidden traps before you step in them.
It gives your bold ideas the foundations they deserve.
And it shifts you from “charging in” to choosing wisely.
Pair that with my favourite double-question — “Why?” and “Why not?” — and you’re mapping out the future landscape and understanding the nuance that sits around each decision.
So the real invitation this week is simple:
Slow down. Look further ahead.
And give your decisions the chance to succeed all the way through and not just on day one.
What’s one decision you’re sitting with right now that deserves a pre-mortem?