Values-Based Decision Making
In the VBDM Process, this is the first step a bold leader takes before listing options or making any decision — recalling what truly matters most.
What is Consult Your Values?
This military term combines the greek words stratos (army) and agos (leader), and names the core skill of seeing the whole field and ordering many parts toward one unified end.
What is strategy?
In 208 seconds on January 15, 2009, Captain Sully identified this as the real problem—not the event that triggered the crisis.
What is lost thrust in both engines?
Clarity is the minimum. Understanding is the goal. This is what proves that communication has truly moved or persuaded the audience.
"What is action?"
This is the automatic physical response to sound, while active listening is the moral choice to pay heed and give attention.
What is hearing?
Thomas More was imprisoned and executed rather than sign an oath he believed was false. This is what his refusal to break his oath reveals about the kind of leader who chose to follow his ___________ over convenience.
What is conscience?
Walt Disney had this leadership ability to picture the future vividly. He imagined something—the happiest place on earth—then spent decades turning it into reality through rides, shows, and guest experiences that embodied it.
What is vision?
In the 5 Whys method, you know you've reached this point when the final answer names something a leader can actually do something about today.
What is the root cause?
This is earned through years of consistent integrity, follow-through, and unobserved habits—not claimed by announcing it in a speech.
"What is ethos?"
The two interlocking practices that form the foundation of active listening—one creates a safe space for the speaker to say everything, and the other reflects the feeling underneath the words back to them.
What are "Empty the Bucket" and "Mirror the Emotion"?
This is the formula a leader must understand: What you value determines what you will give up for that value—and what you give up (or "cut off") with each _____________ reveals what you actually worship.
What is decision?
A student completes her SWOT analysis and identifies twenty-three items across all four quadrants. Instead of trying to act on all of them, she circles one vital item per quadrant as her strategic priorities for the year.
What is the 80/20 principle?
These solutions on the Impact effort matrix feel productive because they demand so much effort—but they move nothing, and a leader should eliminate them without guilt.
What are Time Sinks? OR What is high effort, low impact?
These are the three appeals—character, feeling, and reason—that must work together to move people from understanding to action.
"What is Aristotle's Triangle?" (Acceptable alternative: "What are ethos, pathos, and logos?")
This is the fourth step of the sequence—Observe, Interpret, Label, [ ]—is the working tool a leader uses to ensure they are naming the emotion accurately rather than guessing or projecting onto the person who is speaking.
What is Confirm?
A leader's calendar and bank statement tell the true story. If a leader sacrifices family time for money, or friendship for popularity, or integrity for comfort, Augustine says this is the city the leader is actually serving and leading others toward.
What is the City of Man (passing goods)?
A business leader wrote a beautiful strategic plan naming a clear vision and four strategic priorities. But then he said yes to every new opportunity and partnership request that came up, abandoning this daily discipline of saying no to what does not align with the global strategic plan.
What is local strategic thinking?
When Sully stayed calm while losing both engines at 3,000 feet, he was drawing on this—forty-two years of small deposits that had accumulated into a balance he could withdraw from in a moment of crisis.
What is prudence? OR What is the bank of experience, education, and training?
One leader delivers only powerful logic and evidence. Another delivers only moving stories and emotion. Neither succeeds in moving their audience to action. What must both learn to do?
"What is integrate all three appeals?"
Simon Sinek claims that only one party in a conversation needs to learn this skill well for it to have a transformational impact on a relationship.
What is active listening?
A bold leader must first understand that every choice either moves toward God or away from Him — toward eternal goods or passing goods. For a leader to redirect toward the City of God and lead others there, this must change before anything else can.
What is the leader's core values (or the values she consciously chooses to hold)?
Joan of Arc sent a letter before her battles saying, "I was born for this. I am not afraid. God is with me." Joan's deep confidence and belief—that Orléans could be retaken—was what other generals lacked. Strategy without __________ breaks contact with reality, and __________ without strategy becomes blind.
What is conviction?
When a leader refuses to think clearly about a problem, they are actually doing this to the people they lead—which is why clear thinking is an act of it.
What is Love? Or What is refusing to love them well? OR What is refusing to act with charity?
How you say something as a leader is part of what you are saying. A true message delivered poorly—without preparation, without craft, without respect for the listener—may be heard as false. This reveals that communication is fundamentally a "________" act.
"What is a moral act?"
A leader's first act—before vision, strategy, or correction—is to practice this discipline: stepping inside another person's experience rather than feeling for them from the outside, thereby building the foundation required to actually lead them anywhere.
What is empathy?