Organizations are out there every day, making tons of decisions, but they aren’t keeping track of them. There are many factors within organizations that make them reluctant to learn from experience, so it’s a forlorn hope, but the goal would be to have dispassionate evaluations of past decisions, and to spend some effort in figuring out why each decision did or did not pan out. Doing that systematically is key: really try to question the way you make decisions, and improve it. There is very little motivation within organizations to do this, because it threatens people. Executives don’t like to be second guessed, and procedures that are threatening to them are not likely to be adopted. But as a result, organizations are learning much less than they could from their experiences.
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Source: Rotman Magazine
Subjects: Decision Making, Learning, Organizational Behavior
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