In golf, a decision does not remain theoretical for very long. A few seconds after making it, you have to hit the ball.
The player has assessed the distance, checked the wind, looked at the hazards, chosen a club and picked a target. Some information is available, some is not, yet a commitment still has to be made. Then comes the outcome. Sometimes it is exactly what was expected. Sometimes it is completely different. A few minutes later, the process starts all over again.
A round of golf can therefore be viewed as a succession of decisions made in an environment that can never be fully controlled. The ball can take a bad bounce. The wind can change. A lie can be worse than it first appears. Most importantly, the player is not a machine: two shots hit with exactly the same intention will never produce exactly the same outcome.
This is where the parallel with management becomes far more interesting than the usual clichés about patience, humility or perseverance.
Managers also operate with incomplete information. They make forecasts, allocate resources, set objectives, recruit people, arbitrate between competing priorities and take risks. They must then interpret the results of their decisions without always being able to determine exactly what came from the original choice, what came from execution and what came from circumstances beyond their control.
Golf compresses that process into four hours and 18 holes.
And it adds something particularly uncomfortable: the outcome usually appears almost immediately.
Before the shot: your best shot is not your level
Ask an amateur golfer how far they hit their 7-iron and they will probably give you a number.
But what exactly does that number represent?
Their best 7-iron? Their average? Carry distance? Total distance? Their last ten shots? What they produce from a perfect lie on the range, or what actually happens on the golf course?
The distinction can completely change the decision.
A player who occasionally hits a 7-iron 160 yards is not necessarily a player whose 7-iron goes 160 yards. And even knowing the average is not enough. You also need to know how the shots are distributed around that average.
That is the difference between maximum capability and a distribution of performance.
This distinction has become central to modern golf analysis. Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, developed the strokes gained approach, subsequently adopted by the PGA Tour, to measure the actual contribution of individual shots to scoring rather than relying solely on traditional statistics such as fairways hit, greens in regulation or total putts.
His work draws on extensive databases of professional and amateur shots and has fundamentally changed the way golf performance can be measured.
His book Every Shot Counts is not a book about swing mechanics. It uses data to help golfers better understand their strengths, weaknesses and strategic decisions on the course.
Scott Fawcett took this logic directly into target selection with his DECADE system. Its underlying principle is straightforward: combine a player’s shot distributions with scoring statistics to identify better targets.
The relevant question is therefore no longer simply:
“What shot am I capable of hitting?”
It becomes:
“What do my shots generally produce, including the ones I don’t strike perfectly?”
Consider an approach shot to a green with water down the right and a flag tucked close to that same side.
The player may be perfectly capable of hitting a shot that finishes ten feet from the hole. But that is not necessarily the most useful question.
The strategic question is this: given the player’s normal dispersion, where should they aim so that the entire range of possible outcomes produces the best scoring expectation?
This way of thinking is less spectacular.
It also forces golfers to abandon a flattering version of their own game.
Businesses face exactly the same problem.
A sales director can build a forecast around the best quarter of the previous year. A company can estimate future lead times using a project in which nothing significant went wrong. A manager can assess a team’s capacity based on its strongest performers or build a launch plan by stacking favourable assumptions: the product will be ready on time, recruitment will be completed, customers will respond as expected, competitors will remain stable and the ramp-up will follow the plan.
Each assumption may be reasonable on its own.
Combine all of them and the resulting scenario may no longer be reasonable at all.
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo examined precisely this problem in their work on forecasting. In “Delusions of Success,” published in the Harvard Business Review, they described how cognitive biases and organisational pressures can lead decision-makers towards overly optimistic forecasts.
Their proposed response was to complement the internal view of a project with an outside view: look at a relevant class of comparable projects, examine the distribution of their outcomes, then determine where the current project is likely to sit within that distribution.
The similarity with golf strategy is striking.
The golfer who remembers only the perfectly struck 7-iron is reasoning from a best-case scenario. The golfer who knows their dispersion is reasoning from a distribution.
The executive who asks how much the team could sell is thinking about possibility.
The executive who looks at what the team has actually produced under different conditions begins to think in terms of probability.
The distinction may appear small.
It changes the decision.
None of this means giving up ambition, avoiding difficult flags or setting modest business objectives. It simply means that a serious strategy should not confuse what is possible with what is probable.
In golf as in management, knowing your dispersion is more useful than knowing your personal records.
After the shot: the outcome does not always tell you whether the decision was good
The ball takes off.
It flies on the intended line, lands exactly where planned, takes an unfortunate bounce and finishes in a bunker.
Bad decision?
On the next hole, another player attacks a flag they had very little reason to attack. The ball starts well left, catches a slope and rolls back to ten feet.
Good decision?
We instinctively know the answer.
Yet in professional life, we regularly do exactly the opposite: we use the outcome to reconstruct the quality of the decision that preceded it.
Former professional poker player Annie Duke has a name for this bias: resulting.
In Thinking in Bets and her subsequent work on decision-making, Duke describes our tendency to establish too strong a relationship between the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision.
A good outcome becomes evidence of a good decision. A bad outcome becomes evidence of a mistake.
But a single outcome is not a sufficient sample from which to establish that relationship.
Poker makes the distinction obvious because uncertainty is visible. A player can make the statistically correct decision and still lose the hand. Another can make a poor decision and be rescued by the next card.
Golf has the same characteristic.
A good shot can produce a bad outcome. A poor shot can be rewarded. And even when execution is at fault, that does not necessarily mean the strategic decision was wrong.
At the very least, three things need to be separated:
decision, execution and outcome.
The distinction looks obvious on paper. It becomes considerably harder when the score starts rising.
Imagine a player sensibly aiming for the middle of a green, selecting the correct club and then pushing the shot into a bunker. If the player analyses only the outcome, they may change a strategy that was perfectly sound.
Conversely, if they attack an inaccessible flag with the wrong club and somehow make birdie thanks to a fortunate bounce, the result may reinforce precisely the kind of decision they should avoid repeating.
Every golf shot provides information.
But not all information means the same thing.
The same applies in business.
A salesperson can lose a tender after correctly identifying the client’s needs, mapping the decision-makers, defending the price and conducting a disciplined negotiation.
Another salesperson can win an order despite offering an excessive discount or badly assessing the customer’s risk.
If the organisation looks only at the “won/lost” column, it may punish the first process while reinforcing the second.
Results obviously matter. Golfers count strokes; companies need revenue, margin, quality and profitability.
But the result and the analysis of that result are two different things.
Indeed, it is precisely because results matter that we need to understand how they were produced.
The danger of the next shot
The problem does not end with analysis.
After a bad outcome comes another decision.
And this may be where golf becomes most revealing.
A ball has just gone into the water. The player is annoyed. They immediately want to recover the lost stroke. Instead of accepting the new situation, they choose a more aggressive option.
The risk attached to the next shot is no longer determined solely by the golf course. It has been altered by the emotional consequences of the previous one.
A potential bogey can become a double or triple not because the first mistake was catastrophic, but because its emotional impact changed the next decision.
The PGA of America has repeatedly highlighted the value of a post-shot routine. PGA coach Blake Jirges describes the seconds following a shot as an opportunity to process information about club selection and execution before moving on, rather than allowing one mistake to lead to another.
In February 2026, PGA Professional Braedon Fox presented a particularly simple version of the same idea on PGA.com, inherited from one of his former instructors: allow yourself three seconds to react emotionally to each shot, good or bad, and then move on.
This is not a scientific “three-second rule”. It is a coaching protocol designed to prevent the previous shot from consuming the attention required for the next one.
The management parallel is more revealing here than almost any comparison between the golf swing and leadership.
A company loses an important customer. A product launch fails. An employee makes a mistake. A sales month finishes well below budget.
The manager obviously needs to analyse what happened.
But they also need to prevent that information from degrading the next decision.
After a poor sales period, does the entire strategy really need to change?
After losing one customer, should discounts suddenly be offered to the next ones?
After a failed project, should the organisation become excessively cautious?
After an employee makes a mistake, should the manager start making every important decision personally?
Golfers know this temptation very well:
trying to win back immediately what they have just lost.
The golf course does not know that you have just made a double bogey. The next hole is neither easier nor harder because of it.
It is the player who arrives on the next tee carrying an additional piece of information — and sometimes an additional emotion.
Organisations make the same mistake when they allow the most recent result to dictate the next decision disproportionately.
Maturity does not mean feeling nothing.
It means preventing the previous result from taking control of the next decision.
Around the player: should a manager sometimes behave more like a caddie?
So far, the comparison has mainly concerned self-management.
Professional golf introduces another character that makes the parallel with business even richer: the caddie.
The player remains responsible for the shot. They own the swing, carry the score and sign the card.
But before some decisions, they are not alone.
A caddie gathers information. They calculate distances. They observe the wind, slopes and previous ball flights. They know the player’s game, tendencies and sometimes their emotional state. They may recommend a club, advise against a target or remind the player of a strategy agreed before the round.
But they do not hit the ball.
That boundary between helping someone make a decision and making the decision for them deserves more attention in management.
A good caddie does not simply provide reassurance.
Sometimes, they need to disagree.
They need to be able to say that the club being considered is probably wrong, that the target is too aggressive, that the wind has changed or that frustration appears to be influencing the decision.
But there is an important limit to their intervention.
Once the discussion is over, the player must commit to the decision.
Managers face the same difficulty.
A manager can provide information, share experience, establish boundaries and challenge a decision. But if managers systematically make decisions for their people, they may gain greater control in the short term while progressively reducing their team’s ability to decide without them.
On the other hand, allowing people to decide does not mean allowing anything to happen.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety adds an important dimension here.
In her foundational 1999 study published in Administrative Science Quarterly, the Harvard researcher defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
Conducted across 51 teams in a manufacturing company, the study found an association between psychological safety and learning behaviours such as asking for help or feedback and acknowledging mistakes.
That should not be reduced to the simplistic claim that a team in which everyone feels comfortable will automatically perform better.
The practical question is much more demanding:
Can people say what they see before the mistake happens?
Can an employee tell a manager: “I think this decision is wrong”?
Can a mistake be reported early enough without the person reporting it having an incentive to hide it?
Back to the caddie.
A caddie’s value would almost disappear if they decided it was safer never to contradict the player.
Conversely, a player who asks for advice only to hear confirmation of a decision already made is no longer benefiting from a genuine second opinion.
An effective player-caddie relationship therefore removes neither responsibility nor accountability.
It allows useful information to circulate before the decision is made.
That may be one of the most valuable parallels between golf and management:
a manager’s role is not to hit every important shot. It is also to create the conditions in which other people can make better decisions.
Golf does not measure the quality of a manager
At this point, it would be tempting to draw a conclusion that goes much too far.
A good golfer does not automatically make a good executive. A low handicap measures neither listening skills nor strategic intelligence nor the ability to develop a team. And spending four hours with someone on a golf course is obviously no substitute for assessing their professional abilities.
That is not what makes golf interesting.
Its value lies elsewhere.
During a round, a player has to make dozens of decisions without knowing exactly what the outcome will be.
They need to understand their real capabilities rather than the ones they would like to possess. They need to distinguish between the shot they can hit and the shot they hit reliably enough to build a strategy around.
They need to accept that a good decision can be poorly rewarded and that a good outcome can sometimes disguise a poor decision.
Then they have to do it all again.
Golf also adds one particularly unforgiving constraint: it leaves very little time to construct a story explaining away what has just happened.
The ball is there.
The next shot has to be played.
And during those four hours, playing partners see almost everything: the sensible choices and the unnecessary gambles, the composure of the opening holes and the frustration of the fifteenth.
Few professional situations expose the way someone makes decisions for so long, and from so many different angles.
Perhaps, then, it is not an executive’s golf swing that deserves our attention.
Look instead at the target they choose when a hazard guards the flag. Watch how they react when an excellent shot is unfairly punished. See what happens after two bad holes. Observe whether they can listen to a contrary opinion.
And, above all, look at the difference between the risks they take when they are calm and those they take when they are trying to recover what they have just lost.
A handicap measures the golfer’s level. Their decisions reveal something else: how they deal with risk, mistakes, uncertainty and other people.