Carrie Tan, a transformation coach and former political leader, and Andreas Raharso, an innovation strategist and neuroscience-focused academic, bring together two distinct yet complementary lenses on leadership. Their shared mission reflects a holistic understanding of decision-making that integrates macro-level brain science with deeply personal emotional insight. This collaboration takes form in Micro Moments, a book that introduces a rare dimension of leadership: the split-second experiences that occur just before a decision is made, offering a pivotal perspective into executive decision making.
Their partnership draws strength from contrasting yet interconnected journeys. Tan's work spans political leadership, social impact, and transformational coaching, including her role as founder of Social Mobility non-profit and her service as a Member of Parliament in Singapore. Her practice engages individuals and institutions in cultivating awareness, emotional depth, and inner alignment. "Years of working with leaders across sectors have shaped my perspective that personal narratives, emotional patterns, and lived experiences are inseparable from how decisions unfold in real time," she shares.
Raharso's path moves through corporate leadership, global consulting, and academia. As Program Director at NUS Business School, his work focuses on how leaders think, decide, and anticipate emerging challenges. His research into cognitive science and leadership has led him to examine why even highly experienced executives encounter moments of misjudgment. He says, "I spent years studying why exceptionally prepared leaders still make critical decisions they later revisit, and the answer consistently points to a single unguarded moment."
Their collaboration began through conversations that revealed a natural complementarity. Tan's experience with political leadership and intrapersonal transformation met Andreas's grounding in neuroscience and corporate strategy. Together, they connect disciplines that are often explored separately: scientific inquiry and human experience, structured analysis and emotional awareness, business leadership and psychological insight. This synthesis allows complex ideas to be presented in a way that remains intellectually rigorous while also accessible.
Within this shared framework, Micro Moments introduces a concept that sits within a white space in leadership thinking. Raharso emphasizes, "This is a space that has not been meaningfully explored, and that is precisely why it matters." The book centers on micro moments, fleeting instances, often measured in milliseconds, that occur just before reaction. These moments may influence how information is processed and how decisions take form.
Tan captures the universality of this experience with an observation: "As long as you're human, you are at the mercy of your micro moments," she states. The implication becomes especially significant in leadership contexts, where the scale of impact expands with responsibility. "A single micro moment may influence negotiations, strategic direction, or public outcomes, extending its effects across organizations, communities, and beyond," Tan adds.
The authors' work suggests that many leadership errors of judgement can occur from random imprints in the mind arising from perceptions and interpretations caught in the predictive script without awareness. "These micro moments can be shaped by accumulated experiences, or what I call land mines in the brain. These are subconscious triggers that influence perception," Raharso remarks. Tan adds that these may connect unrelated events, guiding reactions in ways that feel immediate and intuitive, yet originate from past emotional imprints.
This perspective, according to the authors, builds on a fundamental insight: the brain functions as a predictive system. "It generates interpretations based on prior data. Think of the brain acting more like a weather forecast than a reporter. Leaders, in this sense, engage with internally generated projections that feel real, even as they are constructed from memory, pattern recognition, and expectation," Raharso says. This phenomenon, referred to in the book as predictive hallucination, aims to reframe how perception itself is understood.
"Our subconscious narratives and default coping strategies often lead to missed opportunities and errors in judgment that undermine our objectives," Tan explains. "These patterns become especially visible in high-stakes, high-pressure environments, where the micro-moment factor is still largely overlooked. Emotion sits at the core of all mental predictive processing, and disregarding its role in decision-making places our goals at risk."
She adds that as leadership responsibility grows, the influence of these dynamics extends further, shaping organizational performance and, in the case of leaders within state institutions, even affecting national and international policy.
A key dimension of the authors' work highlights the role of emotions. They recognize that in many leadership contexts, emotions have been viewed through a limited lens. Tan offers a broader perspective. She says, "Emotions are powerful signalers of how our minds are functioning, often without our conscious awareness." This reframing intends to position emotions as integral to decision-making, providing information about underlying cognitive processes.
The conversation naturally extends into the role of artificial intelligence. As AI systems expand analytical capabilities, Tan and Raharso believe that the human role in interpreting and acting on insights becomes increasingly significant. "Even with advanced AI inputs, perception filtered through unexamined patterns can influence outcomes. Mastery of micro moments, in this context, becomes a way to engage technology with greater clarity," Raharso states.
To support this, they introduce the OPIJ framework: Observation, Perception, Interpretation, and Judgment. This model outlines the rapid sequence through which the mind processes information, often collapsing multiple steps into an immediate conclusion. The framework serves as a method for identifying where perception begins to diverge from observation, helping leaders to engage more consciously with their own thinking processes. "We see it as a means to illuminate the invisible steps your mind takes before you arrive at a conclusion," Tan says.
Their approach extends beyond awareness into practical intervention. Leaders are encouraged to first recognize the presence of a micro moment, then name the underlying trigger. This is followed by a physiological interruption, such as controlled breathing, to shift the brain's chemistry. Finally, introducing open inquiry invites new information into the decision process. Raharso explains, "The most important decisions you make happen before you even know you've made it."
This progression reflects a broader evolution in leadership. Emotional sovereignty, as described by the authors, represents an advanced capacity to engage with emotions consciously while maintaining autonomy over responses. They note that it builds on earlier concepts of emotional intelligence, extending into a deeper awareness of how emotional patterns influence perception and behavior. This awareness may allow leaders to move beyond habitual scripts.
As organizations continue to navigate increasing complexity, the ideas presented in Micro Moments offer a perspective that integrates neuroscience, emotion, and leadership practice. Their work presents a structured approach to understanding how decisions take form at the most immediate level of human experience. It invites leaders to explore the moments that often pass unnoticed, yet carry profound influence.
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