Dr. Terry: Can you dig into that a bit? What are your thoughts on an emergency medicine informed approach to leadership and problem solving?

Dr. Callaway: I think we are a pretty diverse group of decision makers, so I hesitate to speak for our entire profession. One framework is John Boyd’s “OODA loop” for decision making—Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The OODA loop relies on knowledge, experience, and judgement to push you toward decision and action. It is not a single loop. With each decision, you must reorient and move through the process again. But the key is action. And this is where emergency physicians excel. To lead, one must be able to make hard decisions. Leaders get stuff done. This is what we do every day.

Often, other experts don’t have the urgency to act that emergency medicine instills. They succumb to “analysis paralysis” or are crippled by perceptions of risk. I think we have a unique advantage—we understand risk, we always make decisions with limited and sometimes inaccurate information, we trust our teams to act, and we recognize that an unexpected outcome does not de facto equal failure. Most people don’t necessarily think that way.

Dr. Terry is president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.