High-risk, Critical Decision Making under Time-pressure: Some Parallels and Learning from Split-second Choices Made in Extreme Adventure Sports

In a world where crisis, surprise and change is the new norm, everyone from professional manager down to the layman is keen to understand how to make quick decisions under emergent situations. This article, employing self-reflective analysis of critical incidents, describes the author’s personal experiences from the field of adventure sports categorized as high-risk, critical decisions, involving split-second choices—made while sky-diving and flying between 10,000 feet down to 10 feet above ground level—to trace the mental cognitive processes from a decision maker’s perspective. This is used to discuss and establish a practitioner’s operational framework of high-risk, critical decision scenarios, drawing upon established theories and frameworks from cognitive and psychological decision research.