185 Posts Found

Research about cognitive bias has shown that decision makers are often unduly influenced by their starting points—how their thoughts about a topic are initially framed. Once you’ve defined the problem, don’t focus on the current process or product you want to improve. Instead, says Jim Goughenhour, “imagine what the ideal end state would look like, then work back to put in as much of it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Loren Gary | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

The challenge for me was to have informal contacts and to get information from outside the organization that had been set up to provide me information. I did that beginning at 6:30 every morning, when I’d hit my office having read all the newspapers. I would get the CIA to come in for 20 minutes with no other staff members present and tell me what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Powell | Source: Context Magazine | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Decision Making, Knowledge, Leadership

People often say, “I go with my gut,” and they forget that their gut is informed by huge amounts of data and past experience.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Peretti | Source: FORTUNE | Subject: Decision Making

In our view, leaders would do well to take a more systematic approach to developing their decision-making capabilities. The place to start is… with intellectual integrity. In common usage, the word integrity means honorable or virtuous behavior. For our purposes, though, we draw a distinction between exhibiting honorable behavior (moral integrity) and exhibiting discipline, clarity, and consistency so that all of one’s decisions fit together … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Integrity, Thought

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about the “courage to choose,” and understood that choosing isn’t just an intellectual thing; it takes guts.

Content: Quotation | Author: Cynthia A. Montgomery | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Decision Making

Even in this age of abundant data and rocket-science analytics, many decisions force people to draw on their accumulated wisdom to make the right call. Sometimes that’s because the absolute right answer can’t be known; the question at hand relates to a future too full of uncertainty. Other times, the optimal solution could be determined based on accessible information, but the urgency of the situation … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Brook Manville, Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Babson Insight | Subject: Decision Making

At Intuit, founder Scott Cook developed what they call a culture of experimentation. As he put it, most decisions are based on “politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint,” and none of these “three Ps” are fully trustworthy. So Intuit bases decisions on experiments.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chip Heath, Scott Cook | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Decision Making

Decision framing is often minimized or overlooked. In developing capital project business cases, people tend to start gathering inputs right away and to fill out spreadsheets too soon. When we start building a financial model and collecting data without first framing the decision, we run the risk of falling prey to collecting the wrong data and the common cognitive biases.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Charles Alsdorf, Elayne Ko, Igor Heinzer | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Decision Making

Asking the right, sometimes difficult, questions is a key ingredient of framing. When structuring a large strategic investment decision, it is crucial to understand how risks and uncertainties may affect the investment decision. One useful question to ask stakeholders is: “How could we be wrong?” This requires participants to analyze or otherwise consider the assumptions underlying the decision and explore how the investment might turn … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Charles Alsdorf, Elayne Ko, Igor Heinzer | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Decision Making

Our intuitions can lead us badly astray in a way that is as surprising as it is straightforward. Kahneman identifies two types of mental processes. “Type 1” mental processes are fairly automatic, effortless and place a premium on “associative coherence.” In contrast, “Type 2” mental processes are controlled, effortful and place a premium on logical coherence. Although we fancy ourselves primarily Type 2 creatures, many … [ Read more ]

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

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

Content: Quotation | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Trends / Analysis

If you look at it as an individual, we are all so flawed, and we are all so bad at reasoning when our interests or our moral values are at stake. We are not going to get better at reasoning and change just by helping individuals to reason better. When you put us together into networks, systems, companies, juries and legislative bodies, we can correct … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonathan Haidt | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork, Thought

Data is heavy. It wants to go down, not up, in an organization. In other words, most employees, just by the nature of their responsibilities, don’t want to provide data to their bosses. When there’s a problem, they want to solve it and tell the people above them that they solved it. Information about problems thus sinks to the bottom, out of the eyesight and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Clayton M. Christensen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

The most dangerous thing is not having the wrong answer, it is asking the wrong question.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Trends / Analysis

The nineteenth – and twentieth – century character-building models were limited because they shared one assumption: that Step 1 in the decision-making process – the act of perception – is a relatively simple matter of taking in a scene. The real action involved the calculation about what to do and the willpower necessary to actually do it. […] The first step is actually the most … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Brooks | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Decision Making

Whatever civility might be, it has to do with courtesy, politeness and good manners… Courtesy, politeness, manners and civility are all, in essence, forms of awareness. Being civil means being constantly aware of others and weaving restraint, respect and consideration into the very fabric of this awareness… Through civility we develop thoughtfulness, foster effective self-expression and communication, and widen the range of our benign responses. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

All the governance structures in the world can be boiled down to three types. The open system is consensual and unregulated until it hits a point of action, and then an authority, chosen by the group, decides. A representative democracy is an open system. In the closed system, authority rests with position—the closer you are to the top of the hierarchy, the more authority you … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Kantor | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Government, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

The common belief that we gain “historical perspective” with increasing distance seems to me to utterly misrepresent the actual situation. “What we gain is merely confidence in generalization that we would never dare to make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, History, Trends / Analysis

Being right, knowing how to define things, understanding the difference between what is true and false: None of this is the point. What is important is to understand the results of events, not the events themselves. Real intelligence lies not in the individual, but in the evolutionary process — the ongoing process of trial-and-error. In this process, options (essentially, the freedom to experiment with uncertainty) … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Wisdom