The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision...

Image via Wikipedia

Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony

The Idea in Brief

When executives make big strategic bets, they typically depend on the judgment of their teams to a significant extent.
The people recommending a course of action will have delved more deeply into the proposal than the executive has time to do.
Inevitably, lapses in judgment creep into the recommending team’s decision-making process (because its members fell in love with a deal, say, or are making a faulty comparison to an earlier business case).
This article poses 12 questions that will help executives vet the quality of decisions and think through not just the content of the proposals they review but the biases that may have distorted the reasoning of the people who created them.
This HBR In Brief presents key ideas from a full-length Harvard Business Review article.
To continue reading, subscribe now or purchase a single copy PDF.
Already an online or premium subscriber? Sign in or register now to activate your subscription.

Written By

Image via WikipediaDaniel Kahneman is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, a partner at The Greatest Good, a consultancy, and a consultant to Guggenheim Partners. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work (with Amos Tversky) on cognitive biases.

Dan Lovallo (dan.lovallo@sydney.edu.au) is a professor of business strategy at the University of Sydney and a senior adviser to McKinsey & Company.
Olivier Sibony (olivier_sibony@mckinsey.com) is a director in the Paris office of McKinsey & Company.