I work with leaders on their hardest decisions.
And make sure what they say matters actually happens.
Decision Compass is a research-driven advisory practice that helps organisations and senior leaders make better decisions in complex, high-stakes, and morally uncertain environments — and ensure those decisions actually translate into action.
The work draws on evidence-based decision and epistemics models, alongside moral consideration, a deep concern for care, and an awareness of power relations, incentives, and hidden constraints.
This is not a large consultancy. It is a precision practice. A small number of clients, working closely, on problems that actually matter.
Alex Parry
Founder, Decision Compass
I started my career in research — studying how people and institutions make decisions under uncertainty. That work gave me a lasting interest in the gap between what organisations say they value and what their decision processes actually reflect.
From there I moved into programme management, working inside complex organisations on initiatives that required translating high-level commitments into things that actually happened. The hardest part of any decision is not making it — it is making it stick.
I founded Decision Compass because I kept encountering the same problem: leaders with genuine intelligence and good intentions, making decisions that were worse than they needed to be — because the process was broken, the challenge was absent, or the follow-through was never built in.
The intellectual core of the practice.
Alongside advisory work, the practice produces original research, synthesis, and writing on decision-making, institutions, power, and governance. This is not marketing content — it is the intellectual substrate from which the advisory work grows.
Original research
On decision-making, institutions, power, and governance — with particular attention to how care enters decision procedures and how institutions avoid cruelty normalisation.
Synthesis
Turning complex research into usable mental models and insights. Making the relevant literature accessible to people who need to act on it.
Writing
Essays, frameworks, and research briefs. Published publicly, without funnels or calls to action. Intelligent circles evaluate seriousness through writing.
Structured uncertainty handling
When partnered with organisations: what would change our minds? What do we need to know in order to act? What decision will this research actually inform?
North star values.
Care as a primary moral consideration
The quality of a decision is not only measured by its outcomes, but by the quality of attention and concern brought to those affected by it. Care is not a soft add-on — it is a primary moral consideration that shapes how decisions are framed, who is consulted, and what counts as success.
Moral responsibility under uncertainty
Uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction or for ignoring consequences. The hardest decisions are precisely those where we must act without full information. This practice takes seriously the responsibility to reason carefully even — especially — when the stakes are high and the answers are unclear.
Aversion to irreversible suffering
Some mistakes can be corrected. Others cannot. This practice gives particular weight to decisions that could cause lasting, hard-to-reverse harm — to people, to institutions, or to the conditions under which future decisions will be made.
What I will not do.
Admitting limits increases credibility. These are not marketing claims — they are the actual conditions under which this work operates.
I don't help leaders justify decisions they already know are wrong.
If a decision improves a metric but corrodes trust or causes harm, we slow down.
I don't take on work where the goal is to manufacture legitimacy rather than achieve it.
I don't promise outcomes I can't deliver. The value is in the quality of thinking, not guaranteed results.
Where this work fits.
Most work aimed at improving the future focuses on moral circle expansion, future scenario analysis, or technical and philosophical research. This practice works on something different: the social machinery that determines which futures actually get chosen.
Specifically: how care enters decision procedures, how institutions avoid cruelty normalisation, and how societies retain the ability to course-correct. This is not abstract. It is the work of improving the conditions under which consequential decisions are made, right now, by real people in real institutions.
Animal welfare
Decisions affecting non-human sentient beings, and the institutional conditions that shape them.
AI governance
The decision environments in which transformative technologies are developed, deployed, and regulated.
Democratic resilience
The conditions under which institutions retain the capacity to course-correct and respond to moral learning.
I'm optimising for decisions people can live with ten years from now.
If that sounds like the kind of thinking you need, I'm happy to have a conversation.
Get in touch