189 Posts Found

our approach to prediction seems stuck in the past. Most business forecasts fail to include measurable outcomes and are not recorded, so it is hard to know if we are even getting better at them.

Research from organizational psychologist Philip Tetlock, the co-author of Superforecasting, suggests an alternative. Studying forecasting tournaments where anonymous experts predicted future events, Tetlock found that some forecasters could … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Danny Hernandez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Productivity / Work Tips

Research suggests that checklists can help reduce the influence of unconscious bias in decision making. Google has tested checklists like these to highlight and remind people of common unconscious biases and provide employees with targeted unbiasing strategies.

Content: Article | Source: re:Work | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Productivity / Work Tips

Charlan Nemeth at Berkeley […] finds is that people aren’t actually persuaded by devil’s advocates most of the time. One, they don’t argue forcefully enough because they don’t really believe the position: it’s “All right, I’m going to play a role here. I’ve checked the box, and now I can go right back to the majority view.”

And then, second, even if they do argue with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s an amazing study by Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. He looks at circus performances—think Cirque du Soleil—and collects all these original acts done by different kinds of circus artists: jugglers, dancers, acrobats. He asks people to evaluate their own performances, and then he asks managers to evaluate them as well, and then he has performers judge each other’s videos.

Finally, he … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Creativity, Decision Making, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

The question is why, having identified these cognitive illusions or whatever you want to call them, they persist. We don’t pay more attention to them. […] It’s very hard for a person to self correct. What you can do, Amos [Tversky] would say, is change your environment in which you make decisions, so people are more likely to point out to you if you’re making … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

Although life constantly puts you in these probabilistic situations, these situations that might lend themselves to statistical analysis, we don’t do that. People aren’t natural statisticians. They do something else. What they do is tell stories. They find patterns. Danny [Kahneman ] and Amos [Tversky] were showing the way the mind, when it’s telling stories to resolve uncertainty, makes mistakes.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael Lewis | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

We narrow our decision-making frame when we believe we know what the future will look like. We implicitly assert that everything is locked in except for what we will do, and so we ask this simple, efficient question: “What should we do?”

Should asks people to spot and advocate the one right decision. It treats decision making as a debate. It drives toward closure. We need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Chussil | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Strategy, Thought

The idea behind agile governance is to establish both stable and dynamic elements in making decisions, which typically come in three types. We call big decisions where the stakes are high Type I; frequent decisions that require cross-unit dialogue and collaboration, Type II; and decisions that should be parsed into smaller ones and delegated as far down as possible, often to people with clear accountability, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Kirsten Weerda, Wouter Aghina | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Attention, Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

When evaluating others’ actions, most people focus more on the outcome of decisions than on intentions, a phenomenon that psychologists call outcome bias. A decision […] is often judged to be lower in quality when it leads to a poor, rather than a good, outcome. The outcome bias is costly to organizations. It causes employees and leaders to be blamed for negative outcomes even when … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Francesca Gino | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Any decision made in business is a bet about the way the world works. And until you understand the theory you’re betting on, you can’t really test the decision or improve it.

Content: Quotation | Author: Art Kleiner | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Strategy

For every “make decisions quickly” there is an equally compelling “make decisions carefully” directive. In The Halo Effect, one of the best books I’ve ever read on business, and on critical thinking more generally — author Phil Rosenzweig talks about how the same business decision can be described as “decisive” or “impulsive”, a strategy can be considered “innovative” or “straying from the core.” There are very few, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Neill Occhiogrosso | Source: Medium | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

Intuition is very good — provided that you have [first] gone through the exercise of systematically and independently evaluating, the constituents of the problem. Then when you close your eyes and generate an intuitive, comprehensive image of the case, you will actually add information.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Kahneman | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Thought

Conventional thinking […] confuses a good decision with a good outcome. Most will say, “We cannot know how good a decision is until we’ve seen the results.” That makes no sense in a world of uncertainty and unforeseeable events that decision makers cannot control. A good decision, for example, might be undermined by poor implementation. Or events on the far side of the world may … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter, Jennifer Meyer | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Productivity / Work Tips

A lot of people attribute groupthink to cohesion. They think that if we’re too close, if we trust each other too much […] then we’re not going to challenge each other. That turns out to be false. Cohesive groups often make the best decisions. People frequently when they trust each other are willing to challenge each other and say, “I know this person is not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

At a deep level, no matter where we come from, we are driven by common physiological and psychological needs and motivations. Yet the culture in which we grow up in has a significant bearing on the ways we see communication patterns as effective or undesirable, to find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, to consider certain ways of making decisions or measuring time “natural” or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, Decision Making, International, Personality / Behavior, Thought

Debiasing techniques […] aim to limit the effects of overconfidence by forcing the decision maker to consider downside risks that may have been overlooked or underestimated. And they can mitigate the dangers of confirmation bias by encouraging executives to consider different points of view.

Examples of such techniques include either the systematic use of a devil’s advocate or a “premortem” (individuals project themselves into a future … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Olivier Sibony, Philip Meissner, Torsten Wulf | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Psychology tells us that the one sure way to shut off all perception is to flood the senses with stimuli. That’s why the manager with reams of computer output on his desk is hopelessly uninformed. That’s why it’s so important to exploit the computer’s ability to give us only the information we want—nothing else. The question we must ask is not, “How many figures can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

By now there are hundreds of examples … in which analytics involving the most traditional of data sources outperform traditional modes of decision-making. …

Each case … involves “sorting” or “prioritization” decisions that (a) are central to an organization’s operations; (b) are made repeatedly, typically by experts relying on professional judgment in varying degrees; and (c) incorporate quantifiable information that is readily available, yet commonly used … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Trends / Analysis

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman … writes of two fictitious mental processes that he calls System 1 (“thinking fast”) and System 2 (“thinking slow”). System 1 mental operations are rapid and automatic; they are biased toward belief and confirmation rather than analysis and skepticism; they tend to jump to conclusions and infer causal relations based on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Thought, Trends / Analysis