Ask any professional pilot whether they have a structured approach to problem solving and decision making, and the answer will almost always be yes. Ask them when they last deliberately practised it outside of an emergency scenario — outside of the simulator, outside of a non-normal procedure, on an ordinary sector — and the answer is usually silence.

That gap is the problem. Problem Solving and Decision Making is the one Core Competency where most pilots believe competence is a given. They have a framework. They know the acronym. They've used it in the sim. But frameworks that are only activated under pressure, by people who haven't built the underlying habits in normal operations, produce slow, incomplete, and sometimes wrong outputs at exactly the moment when slow, incomplete and wrong are most costly.

The Framework Is Not the Competency

TDODAR, FORDEC, DECIDE — the specific acronym matters less than the structure it represents. All of the established frameworks share the same foundational logic: diagnose first, then options, then decide, then act, then review. The sequence is deliberate. Each step depends on the one before it.

The step that is most consistently undervalued is the first one. Diagnosis is not simply identifying what has gone wrong. It is understanding what the end state of the problem actually is — what it means for the flight, the aircraft, the crew, and the passengers — and how that end state then constrains every option that follows. A crew that rushes past diagnosis to get to options is generating solutions to a problem they haven't yet fully understood. That is not decision making. It is guessing with structure.

The framework begins with diagnosis for a reason. A crew that skips it doesn't make faster decisions — it makes poorly-framed ones.

The second most undervalued step is the review. Decisions made under pressure, with incomplete information, in dynamic environments, need to be revisited. The situation changes. The initial diagnosis may have been wrong. New information arrives. A decision that was correct at the moment it was made may need to be changed — and changing it is not a failure. Refusing to change it when the evidence demands it is.

Why Practice Is the Prerequisite

Structured decision making is a cognitive skill. Like any cognitive skill, it degrades without use and improves with deliberate practice. The error most pilots make is treating the framework as something to be retrieved from memory when needed, rather than something to be maintained as a live habit.

The consequence is that when a real non-normal arrives — when the workload is high, the time is short, and the outcome is uncertain — the crew is running the framework for the first time under conditions that are exactly wrong for first-time execution. The steps that should be automatic require conscious effort. The language that should flow requires retrieval. The pauses that should be disciplined feel like lost time.

The fix is straightforward in principle. Use the framework in normal operations. Not as a formal procedure, but as a mental habit. When a minor irregularity arises — an unexpected clearance change, a systems message that requires a decision, a weather development that changes the plan — run the diagnostic step deliberately. Ask what the end state of this situation actually is. Consider the options explicitly. Risk-assess them. Commit to a decision and state it. Review it ten minutes later.

Doing this on sectors where the stakes are low builds the habit that makes the framework reliable when the stakes are not. The simulator cannot replicate this accumulation. It can test the output but it cannot build the underlying habit. That is built on the line, across hundreds of ordinary decisions, by pilots who treat every small problem as a practice opportunity.

Options Must Be Risk-Assessed

Generating options is not enough. Every option needs to be evaluated against the same framework: what is the benefit, what is the risk, what are the alternatives, and what happens if we do nothing. This is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the mechanism that prevents crews from selecting the first viable option they identify — which is almost never the best one — and from overlooking the do-nothing option, which is sometimes correct and more often correctly eliminates itself when stated explicitly.

◈ Risk-Assessing Options

For each option under consideration, four questions: What is the benefit of this course of action? What is the risk? Is there an alternative we haven't considered? What happens if we do nothing? The value of the last question is often underestimated. Stating "if we do nothing, X happens" forces the crew to confront the real cost of inaction — and occasionally reveals that inaction is in fact the safest immediate response.

Threat and Error Management sits beneath all of this. The options a crew generates, and the one they select, need to be evaluated against the threat environment — not just against the immediate problem. A solution that resolves the technical issue while increasing crew workload, reducing situational awareness, or degrading communication creates new threats even as it addresses the presenting one. The best decisions reduce the total threat load. The worst ones redistribute it.

The Competency Connections That Matter

Problem Solving and Decision Making does not operate in isolation. It is perhaps the most connection-dependent competency in the framework — because good decision making requires inputs from almost every other competency, and its outputs affect all of them.

↔ Connects With
Leadership & Teamwork
The decision-making process is a crew activity, not a solo one. The Captain who diagnoses privately, generates options privately, and announces a decision is not using the framework — they are performing it. Effective Problem Solving and Decision Making requires the First Officer's diagnostic input, their option generation, and their honest assessment of the risks. That contribution only happens in a Leadership and Teamwork environment that actively invites it.
↔ Connects With
Communication
The decision needs to be communicated — clearly, concisely, and in a way that creates a shared understanding of what has been decided and why. A decision that exists only in the Captain's head is not a crew decision. The process of verbalising the diagnosis, the options and the chosen course of action also serves a cognitive function: it forces precision, surfaces gaps in the reasoning, and creates a record that can be reviewed.
↔ Connects With
Application of Knowledge & Procedures
The options available to a crew are bounded by their knowledge. A crew that doesn't know the aircraft system deeply cannot generate the full range of options. A crew that doesn't understand the regulatory and procedural environment cannot risk-assess them accurately. Application of Knowledge is the database that Problem Solving draws from. The richer and more accurate that database, the better the options — and the better the decision.
↔ Connects With
Workload Management
Running a structured decision-making process takes cognitive bandwidth. It also organises the response that follows. A crew under high workload that hasn't managed that workload before the problem arrives will find the framework competes with everything else for attention. Workload Management creates the spare capacity that Problem Solving requires — and the decision-making process, well executed, then becomes a workload management tool, because a clear decision reduces the number of open questions the crew is carrying.
↔ Connects With
Situational Awareness
SA feeds the diagnosis. The accuracy of the initial problem assessment is entirely dependent on the quality of the crew's situational awareness at the moment the problem presents. A crew with degraded SA will diagnose from an incomplete picture. Conversely, good decision making actively rebuilds SA — the process of stating the situation, the options, and the decision creates a shared mental model that both crew members can verify and update. Decision making and situational awareness are mutually reinforcing when both are functioning well.

What Good Actually Looks Like

A crew that has developed this competency doesn't look dramatic when a problem arrives. They look methodical. The Captain calls the situation — states what they know, what they don't know, and what they think the end state is if nothing changes. The First Officer adds to the picture or corrects it. Together they generate options, state them explicitly, and risk-assess each one. They select a course of action, state it clearly, and assign tasks. They set a review point.

The point is not the duration of the process — it is that the process happens at all, that both crew members contribute to it, and that the decision is made consciously rather than by default.

The crews who struggle are the ones who skip straight to action. Who identify the problem and immediately start doing things without pausing to diagnose, without generating options, without risk-assessing. Their actions may be correct. But they are operating on instinct rather than process, and instinct — however good — is not a reliable substitute for structured thinking in a novel, high-stakes situation.

The crews who look calm in a non-normal aren't the ones who are least affected by the pressure. They're the ones who practised when the pressure wasn't there.

Problem Solving and Decision Making is the competency that determines whether a crew's knowledge, awareness, and communication are deployed effectively when it matters most. It cannot be improvised. It can only be practised — and the place to practise it is not the simulator. It is every sector, every decision, every ordinary problem that doesn't feel like a training opportunity but is.

✦ High Performance Pilot
Build Problem Solving Habits
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HPP maps all nine Problem Solving and Decision Making behaviours across three development levels — with structured prompts to build the diagnostic and decision-making habits that make the framework reliable under pressure. Free to start.

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✦ High Performance Brief
Decision Making Starts at the Brief
The briefing is where contingency decisions are made before they're needed. HPB is a free tool for building Core Competency-led briefing habits — including the decision frameworks that matter when things change.
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