Hidden Traps in Decision Making
THINKING ABOUT...
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In making decisions, your own mind may be your worst enemy.
most important job of any executive. It's also t h e toughest and the riskiest. Bad decisions can damage a business and a career, sometimes irreparably. So where do bad decisions come from? In many cases, they can be traced back to the way the decisions were m a d e - t b e alternatives were not clearly defined, the right information was not collected, the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed. But sometimes the fault lies not in tbe decision-making process but rather in tbe mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage our decisions. Researchers have been studying the way our minds function in making decisions for half a century. This research, in the laboratory and in the field, has revealed that we use unconscious routines to cope with tbe complexity inherent in most decisions. These routines, known as heuristics, serve us well in most situations. In judging distance, for example, our minds frequently rely on a heuristic that equates clarity with proximity. The clearer an object appears, the closer we judge it to be. The fuzzier it appears, the farther away we assume it must be. This simple mental sbortcut helps us to make the continuous stream of distance judgments required to navigate the world. Yet, like most heuristics, it is not foolproof. On days that are hazier
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AKING DECISIONS iS t h e
than normal, our eyes will tend to trick our minds into thinking that things are more distant tban tbey actually are. Because the resulting distortion poses few dangers for most of us, we can safely ignore it. For airline pilots, though, tbe distortion can be catastrophic. Tbat's why pilots are
HIDDEN TRAPS IN DECISION MAKING by ]ohn S. Hammond, Ralph L Keeney, and Howard Raiffa
S. Hammond is a consultant on decision making and a former professor at the Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. Ralph L. Keeney is a professor at
I
In making decisions, your own mind may be your worst enemy.
most important job of any executive. It's also t h e toughest and the riskiest. Bad decisions can damage a business and a career, sometimes irreparably. So where do bad decisions come from? In many cases, they can be traced back to the way the decisions were m a d e - t b e alternatives were not clearly defined, the right information was not collected, the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed. But sometimes the fault lies not in tbe decision-making process but rather in tbe mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage our decisions. Researchers have been studying the way our minds function in making decisions for half a century. This research, in the laboratory and in the field, has revealed that we use unconscious routines to cope with tbe complexity inherent in most decisions. These routines, known as heuristics, serve us well in most situations. In judging distance, for example, our minds frequently rely on a heuristic that equates clarity with proximity. The clearer an object appears, the closer we judge it to be. The fuzzier it appears, the farther away we assume it must be. This simple mental sbortcut helps us to make the continuous stream of distance judgments required to navigate the world. Yet, like most heuristics, it is not foolproof. On days that are hazier
M
AKING DECISIONS iS t h e
than normal, our eyes will tend to trick our minds into thinking that things are more distant tban tbey actually are. Because the resulting distortion poses few dangers for most of us, we can safely ignore it. For airline pilots, though, tbe distortion can be catastrophic. Tbat's why pilots are
HIDDEN TRAPS IN DECISION MAKING by ]ohn S. Hammond, Ralph L Keeney, and Howard Raiffa
S. Hammond is a consultant on decision making and a former professor at the Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. Ralph L. Keeney is a professor at