The physiology of a decision

When most people hear the phrase “decision-making”, their minds immediately drift to presidents, governors, CEOs, cabinet ministers, and boardrooms. They imagine high-stakes decisions involving mergers, acquisitions, elections, budgets, and national policies. As a result, they often overlook the thousands of decisions made every day throughout organisations by frontline employees, supervisors, team leaders, middle managers, and project teams.

Yet these everyday decisions frequently have a more immediate impact on organisational performance than the headline-grabbing decisions of senior leaders. An account officer decides how to handle a frustrated customer. A project team decides whether to escalate a risk or ignore it. A relationship manager decides whether to challenge a client’s assumptions or simply agree with them. Individually, these decisions may seem small. Collectively, they shape customer experience, project delivery, operational efficiency, innovation, and ultimately business performance.

“The quality of our organisations ultimately reflects the quality of our decisions. Strategies are not executed once; they are executed thousands of times through the decisions people make every day.”

The challenge, however, is that good decision-making is far more complicated than many people assume. One of the most common misconceptions is that good decisions always produce good outcomes. A well-considered decision can produce a poor outcome because of uncertainty, while a poor decision can occasionally produce a good outcome because of luck. Former professional poker player and decision scientist Annie Duke makes this distinction in her book Thinking in Bets, arguing that decision quality should be judged by the process used to reach the decision, not merely by the eventual outcome. This insight is particularly important for leaders who are often tempted to celebrate successful outcomes without examining whether the underlying decision process was sound.

A second misconception is that experience automatically leads to better decisions. While experience can certainly help, research by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that even highly experienced professionals are vulnerable to systematic errors in judgement. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains how human beings rely on mental shortcuts that help us make decisions quickly but can also lead us astray.

These shortcuts create what psychologists call cognitive biases. Among the most common is confirmation bias, our tendency to seek information that supports what we already believe while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. Another is anchoring bias, where we become overly influenced by the first piece of information we receive. Availability bias causes us to overestimate the importance of recent or memorable events, while overconfidence bias leads us to place excessive faith in our own judgements and predictions.

The danger is that these biases rarely announce themselves. We do not wake up in the morning intending to make poor decisions. Instead, our brains quietly distort how we interpret information, assess risks, and evaluate alternatives. Left unchecked, these biases can lead organisations to launch flawed products, pursue weak strategies, overlook risks, and repeat costly mistakes.

Decision-making becomes even more challenging when groups are involved. Conventional wisdom suggests that teams make better decisions because they bring together diverse perspectives. Sometimes they do. But sometimes groups become less intelligent than the individuals who comprise them. Social psychologist Irving Janis described this phenomenon as ‘groupthink’ – a situation where the desire for harmony and consensus suppresses critical evaluation and dissenting opinions. History offers numerous examples. The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and several corporate scandals have all been linked, at least in part, to decision-making cultures where individuals were reluctant to challenge prevailing assumptions.

The good news is that better decision-making can be learned. Organisations can deliberately build processes that improve the quality of decisions and reduce the influence of bias. One useful tool is Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats framework. Rather than allowing discussions to become unstructured debates, the framework encourages participants to examine decisions from six different perspectives: facts and information, emotions and intuition, risks and cautions, benefits and opportunities, creativity and alternatives, and process management. By forcing teams to look at issues through multiple lenses, the quality of discussion and decision-making often improves significantly.

Another powerful practice is the use of premortems, popularised by psychologist Gary Klein. Instead of asking why a proposal might succeed, leaders imagine that it has failed spectacularly and work backward to identify possible causes. This simple exercise helps surface risks that may otherwise remain hidden.

A third practice is assigning a devil’s advocate during major discussions. While this role is often unpopular, research suggests that structured dissent improves decision quality by challenging assumptions and exposing blind spots. Similarly, organisations should embrace evidence-based decision-making. Before making significant decisions, leaders should routinely ask: What evidence supports this conclusion? What assumptions are we making? What would change our minds? These questions help shift discussions from opinion and intuition toward evidence and critical thinking.

The quality of our organisations ultimately reflects the quality of our decisions. Strategies are not executed once; they are executed thousands of times through the decisions people make every day. Products, services, customer experiences, and business results are all downstream consequences of those decisions. The organisations that consistently outperform their competitors are not necessarily those with the smartest people. They are often those with the best decision-making processes. In the end, better organisations are built one decision at a time.

Omagbitse Barrow is the chief executive of Efiko Management Consulting, and he supports organisations and leaders to translate their strategy to results.