What 200+ Leadership Simulations Reveal About How Executives Actually Decide.

Over the past quarter, we ran over 200 leaders through the SSUNDAR crisis simulation — five cascading organizational decisions, AI-generated scenarios, real consequences that compound. The simulation captures something traditional assessments can't: how leaders actually behave when decisions interact with each other under time pressure.

Three patterns emerged. None of them are what conventional leadership theory predicts.

Pattern 1: Early caution is the most expensive instinct.

The simulation has a compounding mechanic — early decisions reshape what's possible in later rounds. Leaders who play it safe in rounds 1 and 2, hoping to "gather information" before committing, consistently end up in a decision deficit by round 4. The organizational environment degrades around them while they deliberate.

This contradicts the popular wisdom that effective leaders "slow down to speed up." In cascading environments — which is what most organizational reality looks like — slowing down in the early stages doesn't buy clarity. It buys constraint. The leaders who scored highest made decisive early moves, even imperfect ones, because they understood intuitively that in compounding systems, a good decision now beats a perfect decision later.

Pattern 2: Dimensional bias predicts organizational blind spots.

The simulation scores leaders across three dimensions: Judgment-Centered Design (how they structure decisions), Multi-Skilled Talent Pools (how they build capability), and Performance Engine Integration (how they connect effort to outcomes). Almost no leader scores evenly across all three. Most have a dominant dimension — a default lens through which they see every problem.

A leader who defaults to Performance Engine thinking will optimize every crisis for efficiency — which works until the crisis requires building new capability (Talent Pools) or redesigning the decision-making structure itself (Judgment Design). A leader who defaults to Talent Pool thinking will invest in people development even when the immediate crisis requires system redesign. The bias is invisible to the leader themselves. They don't see it as a bias. They see it as "how problems should be solved."

This has massive implications for succession planning. If you're building a leadership bench, the relevant question isn't "who has the best track record?" It's "what dimensional bias does this leader carry, and does it complement or compound the dimensional bias already dominant in the team?"

Pattern 3: Custom responses outperform structured options — but only for leaders with high Judgment Design scores.

The simulation offers structured options for each crisis, plus the ability to write a custom response. Leaders with high Judgment Design scores who choose the custom path consistently outperform those who select from the menu — because they're synthesizing multiple structured approaches into something context-appropriate. But leaders with low Judgment Design scores who write custom responses perform worse. They're not synthesizing. They're improvising without architecture.

This pattern has direct implications for how organizations should think about leadership autonomy. Giving leaders more freedom isn't universally positive. It's positive for leaders whose judgment architecture can support it. For leaders without that architecture, more freedom means more expensive mistakes. The answer isn't to restrict autonomy — it's to build the judgment foundation that makes autonomy productive.

These patterns aren't academic. They're structural insights that should change how organizations design their leadership pipeline, plan succession, and allocate development investment. And they're only visible because the simulation captures cascading behavior — the way decisions interact over time — rather than isolated competency snapshots.

The data will keep growing. The patterns will keep clarifying. This is what happens when you replace surveys with systems.