Renata Salas
RS
New book, out now
Most bad calls aren’t made by people who know too little. They’re made by people who wait too long to decide. The First Five Minutes is a field guide for the other kind of team.
speaking
Give a room one clear way to decide
…and it will hold under pressure long after the applause.
For twenty years Renata ran toward the moments most people run from — the first minutes of a trauma bay, when the information is thin, the stakes are a life, and the clock will not wait for certainty. She now takes what those rooms taught her to boardrooms, trading floors, flight decks, and operating theatres.
Her talks aren’t war stories. They hand an audience a repeatable way to make a defensible call before the facts arrive — and to keep a team calm enough to make it. See the keynotes →
Certainty is a luxury the room rarely offers. The work isn’t to feel sure — it’s to make the call you can still defend at three in the morning, and to make it in time to matter.
— from The First Five Minutes
the books
Two books on deciding well
Written for anyone whose worst day is decided in the first few minutes — and for the teams who want more of those minutes to go right.
New · 2024
The First Five Minutes
How good teams decide before they’re ready.
The new book on making — and living with — the call you can’t put off, from the first minutes of a trauma bay to the first minutes of a crisis in any room.
2021
Cold Calm
The habits of people who don’t panic.
Why some teams speed up cleanly while others come apart at the worst moment — and how to build the first kind on purpose, one rehearsed habit at a time.
about
Meet Renata
Twenty years in the emergency room taught her how good decisions actually get made when the information is thin and the clock won’t wait.
Now she teaches it — to hospitals and air-ambulance crews, but also to airlines, trading desks, and leadership teams whose hardest calls can’t wait for certainty. No bravado, no gut-instinct mysticism: a method you can practise.
what people say
From the front of the room
She changed how our ORs debrief
We brought Renata in expecting a motivational talk and got a working method instead. Six months on, her “decide, act, name the doubt out loud” drill is how our surgical teams run a difficult case. Complication reviews that used to turn into blame now turn into learning.
Dr. Priya Anand
Chief of Surgery, Halden Memorial Hospital
The best 50 minutes of our offsite
Our leadership team makes million-dollar calls on incomplete data every week, and most of us secretly hate it. Renata gave us language for that discomfort and a way to move through it without freezing or bluffing. People are still quoting her three quarters later.
Marcus Feldt
COO, Northlake Logistics Group
She held four hundred pilots dead silent
An aviation audience is a tough crowd — they’ve heard every “decision under pressure” cliché. Renata skipped all of it and talked about the real thing: how a good crew argues, decides, and commits before there’s time to be certain. Easily the highest-rated session we’ve ever run.
Captain Lena Okafor
Head of Training, Meridian Airways
the decision brief
One letter a month on deciding well
A short read on judgment under pressure — one real case, one question worth sitting with, and one thing to try before your next hard call. No noise, unsubscribe anytime.
Bring Renata to your stage
Keynotes, half-day workshops, and live decision drills for teams who make hard calls with the clock running. Dates for the coming year are opening now.