Before the decision making.....
I visited a very learned PPRuNer today, and in his hangar is a framed group of wise aviation sayings. One of them reads: "Never take a plane somewhere your mind has not been five minutes earlier.". Wise, but certainly not new.
After a great flight, we stood and chatted, and exchanged the notion that accidents are often preceded by poor pilot decision making, but that poor pilot decision making can be preceded by a lack of thinking ahead about the grand plan. Failure to consider the grand plan, or even acknowledge that there should be one, can lead to the need for some rather vital pilot decision making, which is then already steps behind, for lack of thinking about the grand plan.
He and I agreed that present day flight training may be cheating student pilots somewhat in that we're teaching pilots how to fly, but are we teaching them to how to plan to fly?