At 7:12 a.m., a CEO I once worked with fired off an email that made perfect sense—until it didn't.
A board member had written, "We need to revisit the assumptions under this plan." The CEO read it as We don't trust you, heard an implied and we never did, and responded with a crisp, legalistic note that chilled the room for weeks. Later, when the chair asked what had happened, the CEO's answer was revealing: "I just reacted."
That phrase—I just reacted—is the confession most leadership failures share. Under time pressure, status threat, or fatigue, even highly intelligent and otherwise capable executives can collapse into a detrimental autopilot: defensiveness masquerading as decisiveness; certainty standing in for judgement; speed substituting for clarity. What distinguishes leaders who keep improving is not raw brainpower. It is a quieter capacity: metacognition—the ability to notice one's own thinking while it is happening, and to revise it before it hardens into action.
The term goes back to developmental and cognitive psychology: "knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena" or thinking about thinking, as John H. Flavell (1928–2025) defined it in his seminal work Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring. In practice, it is the difference between having a thought and being had by a thought. For leaders, that difference is often the margin between judgement and regret.
Below are three ways metacognition earns its keep in organisational life: by interrupting autopilot, by changing how the brain regulates emotion and belief, and by being designed—deliberately—into the routines of leadership and teams.
"It is the difference between having a thought and being had by a thought."
1) From Autopilot to Judgement
At the risk of making an obvious generalisation, most leaders do not make their worst calls when calm and well-rested. They make them when hurried, challenged, or publicly scrutinised—precisely when the mind's predictive machinery becomes most rigid. Metacognition matters because it is the capacity to insert a pause between stimulus and response: What story am I telling myself? What am I assuming? What else could be true?
Two strands of evidence are particularly relevant for executives.
First, metacognition is closely tied to error-awareness and confidence calibration—how well people can judge whether they are right or wrong without external feedback. Reviews in cognitive neuroscience show that we can monitor decision quality (often via confidence judgements) in ways that support learning and reduce repeated mistakes. In business terms, this is the capacity to sense when you're bluffing—before the organisation pays for it.
Asking people how confident they are has become a common way to capture "confidence-in-accuracy" of projects. But treat it as a signal, not a verdict or data in the sense of measurable and immutable. The obvious weakness is reliability: if there's no cost to bluffing (or no reward for candour), why expect people to report their true confidence?
Second, the degree to which a person's view of themselves matches how other people experience them—technically called "self–other agreement"—appears to separate strong managers from merely competent ones. In a large study of managerial self-awareness—made objective by comparing the congruence between self-ratings and direct reports' ratings—high(er)-performing managers were significantly more self-aware than average-performing managers. This is not a moral compliment; it is a performance variable. When leaders cannot see themselves as they really are, they cannot reliably adjust their decision making.
What makes metacognition difficult is that it is mildly chastening for people who daily don the armour of iron-clad certainty in the face of withering professional scepticism. It demands that leaders treat their first interpretation as a hypothesis rather than a verdict. That posture is rare in cultures that reward certainty and punish visible doubt.