Myth 1: Experts don’t make disastrous choices
Often the most damaging decisions come from experts. Why does that happen? It happens because for many decisions that have very serious implications, we usually depend on experts. Due to such passive, unguarded acceptance, when the experts go wrong, their bad decisions can have devastating consequences. Expert failure ‘usually is the worst kind of failure’ and ‘it’s the overconfidence of experts that can result in spectacular mistakes.’ Normally we think of failure in terms of a deficiency of knowledge, but the truth is that society is suffering far more from failures because of expertise.
Myth 2: Teams take wiser decisions than individuals
Team decision is defined as mode of thinking that people engage in when deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. Moreover, group think cannot be countered by having more knowledgeable members in the team. Also, involvement of too many people can aggravate the chance of making mistakes.
Myth 3: No one remains locked in a bad decision, knowingly
When we make a choice that doesn’t work out, we find it remarkably difficult to cut our losses and walk away. Whenever we overinvest our time, energy, or resources in a choice that falls short of the desired return, we have a tendency to stay locked in it in the anticipation of change of fortune. Many a time, we find ourselves so much committed to a decision that we are unable to walk away from it.
Myth 4: More information leads to better decision making
There is a common misconception that availability of more data improves the quality of decisions. Giving people extra bits of information doesn’t improve their chances of getting it right. It only improves their belief in the accuracy of their own opinion. What is important is to know what problem one is trying to solve and how to effectively utilize the existing data for that purpose instead of seeking additional data and muddying the waters.
Myth 5: Decision making is purely a logical process
Brain science makes it clear that mental processes, which we’re not conscious of, drive our decision making and logical reasoning and are often just a way to justify emotional choices. Research has also proved that no one makes a decision based on logic alone. Consciousness is no more than a passive machine running one simple algorithm — to serve up what’s already been decided, and take credit for the decision.
Myth 6: Good decisions bring predictable outcomes
Decision making is not fortune telling. So it’s unwise to expect that good decisions will necessarily bring predictable outcomes. Moreover, such an expectation implicitly restricts the decision space to the known. In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, decision making largely depends on transformational thinking and risk-taking ability. Bad Outcomes’ raises an alarm on the fallacy of outcome-based mindset towards decision making. There’s plenty of random noise in competitive decision making and many outcomes are outside a leader’s control due to dependencies on various environmental factors.
Myth 7: Good decisions are independently vetted by many
J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by 12 established publishers before Bloomsbury eventually accepted it. Clearly, in this case, all those 12 publishers independently arrived at a wrong choice.
Even Bloomsbury was tentative, as they decided to go ahead with a first print run of only 500 copies. In one interview, Nigel Newton, the chairman of Bloomsbury Publishing, revealed that although he took the manuscript home, he didn’t read it immediately. However, his eight-year old daughter Alice liked the initial few chapters so much that she pestered her dad for a few months to know what would come next.
This example illustrates that multiple people can sometimes independently arrive at a wrong decision; almost as if all of them have a common cognitive ‘blind spot’. So, it may not be prudent to have high confidence on a choice only because it is vetted by majority.
Source: Economictimes
