Before You Make That Big Decision... (Harvard Business Review Article)

When an executive makes a big bet, he or she typically relies on the judgment of a team that has put together a proposal for a strategic course of action. After all, the team will have delved into the pros and cons more deeply than the executive has time to do. The problem is, biases invariably creep into any team's reasoning-and often dangerously distort its thinking. A team that has fallen in love with its recommendation, for instance, may dismiss evidence that contradicts its theories, give too much weight to one piece of data, or make faulty comparisons to another business case. That's why, with important decisions, executives need to conduct a careful review not only of the content of recommendations but of the recommendation process. To that end, the authors-Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on cognitive biases; Lovallo of the University of Sydney; and Sibony of McKinsey-have devised a 12-question checklist intended to unearth and neutralize defects in teams'