"Better decisions"

"Catastrophic decisions live on in the business lore as testament to the perennial difficulty of making good decisions.

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1. Make sure you truly understand the problem. There is often an unavoidable tendency to fall into what I call ‘the conclusion trap’. In a fast-changing environment, executives often feel pressured to make decisions quickly. Combine that with years of training and reinforcement with the kind of System 1 (automatic, intuitive) thinking that Daniel Kahneman describes, and you have a perfect recipe for jumping to incorrect conclusions or solutions that can sink an organization. 

Perhaps the most important step you can take in this regard is to go and see. Like a good detective, go to the ‘scene of the crime’ and directly observe the situation. 

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2. Define a process. We tend to think of decision-making as a fine art that comprises intuition, experience and myriad other unquantifiable factors — rather than as a process that can be improved. Humans are afflicted with far too many cognitive biases to rely on the alchemy of ‘gut feel’. 

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To mitigate the pernicious effects of cognitive biases, organizations need to view decision-making as a process that can be monitored and improved with appropriate systems and structures. Here are five ideas that will help:

• Send materials in advance. To avoid peer conformity, allow people to think through the issues in advance, individually. Share the relevant information before every meeting and ask people to develop recommendations. Collect these ahead of time and discuss them at the meeting. The different perspectives will lead to more productive and thoughtful discussions.
• Clarify the assumptions. It is essential that everyone starts out with the same assumptions. The materials provided must specify what those critical assumptions are and what the goals are for the decision. Are you striving to maximize market share? Are you anticipating a flat, declining or growing market? People must have the same starting point for their analysis.
• Conduct a pre-mortem. Pretend that the decision agreed to turns out badly. Assess ‘what went wrong’ and why. This discussion will identify weaknesses in the plan.
• Assign a devil’s advocate. A devil’s advocate arguing against your recommended course of action will point out any holes in the ‘solution’. Because the role is assigned, there will be less of a temptation to succumb to peer pressure to conform.
• Define the rules of engagement. Tribal knowledge in organizations teaches people how to behave in meetings.

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3. Solve at the right level. Decisions should be made, and problems solved, as close to the issue as possible.

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4. Run experiments. The amount of data available to organizations today enables them to run experiments quickly and inexpensively, enabling them to easily validate new pricing strategies, marketing campaigns or product features. Before committing to a decision, run an experiment with a small group of customers, or with just one factory or geographic region.

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5. Train and institutionalize these behaviours. Commit to teaching employees this decision-making approach. Make sure they know how to use the tools and structures listed here. Companies provide training for their employees on all kinds of skills, and decision-making should be treated in the same way. "

Trechos retirados de "The path to better decisions" de Daniel Markovitz, publicado em Rotman Management Spring 2021.