The Decision-Making Blind Spots Costing You Success (And How to Overcome Them)

Dan Ahearn
Oct 8
7 min read

Imagine losing millions of dollars annually due to poor decision making - this is the reality for many organizations. Leaders must accept a fundamental reality as shared by former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. "When facing a hard policy decision with imperfect people and imperfect information dealing with imperfect choices, you're going to get imperfect results." What are you doing to equip your people to make effective decisions despite these constraints?

Strong decision-makers need both knowledge and skills, whether handling routine daily choices or high-stakes decisions that affect stakeholders, stockholders, and everyone the organization touches. Leaders must prioritize educating, training, and empowering their teams to navigate this reality.

The Range of Decisions in Your Organization

Consider the range of daily decisions in your organization:

Strategic decisions are long term and set the overall direction of the organization. These are made by leadership or senior management ans shape your organization's future.

Tactical decisions are medium term with a focus on how to implement strategies. Made by middle management, these bridge the gap between vision and execution.

Operational decisions are short term with a focus on day-to-day activities. Made by lower to middle management, their cumulative impact on organizational performance is substantial.

What decision-making strategy do you utilize in each of these situations? Do you spend more time processing certain decisions or offload what you consider to be less consequential decisions? What procedures are in place to promote good decision-making for yourself and your employees? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your procedures?

Understanding What Derails Good Decisions

Before improving your decision-making process, you need to understand what's working against you. Two forces consistently undermine even the smartest leaders: how we search for information and the cognitive biases we all carry.

The Research Trap

How do you conduct research to confirm or challenge decisions? Do you commit to finding the most accurate information or simply choose information that reinforces existing beliefs?

While it may be faster and easier to find information in support of existing beliefs, you owe it to your organization and stakeholders to seek the most reliable data for the decision.

Recent research on The Narrow Search Effect reveals how online searches reinforce our existing beliefs rather than challenge them. How do you ensure that you are not unduly influenced by false narratives, especially with the proliferation of AI? How much are you using AI to help make decisions in your organization? A 2024 study at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business found that “the most effective use of AI isn’t in replacing human judgement but in enhancing it, and companies and people who develop AI interaction expertise will be better positioned to navigate an increasingly AI-integrated world.” It’s your responsibility to ensure that your people are using AI tools responsibly and effectively and not simply as a time saving way to come to a decision.

Cognitive Biases That Impact Your Decisions

Research by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman shows how cognitive biases (systematic errors in thinking) impact your decision making. While you can never eliminate these biases entirely, understanding them is the first step toward making better decisions. What common biases impact your organization, and how are you going to counteract those biases? Here are some examples:

Loss Aversion: A natural tendency to avoid incurring loss. This fear can prevent us from taking even well-calculated risks with worthwhile returns. For example, Polaroid’s leadership clung to traditional film, avoiding the risk of fully embracing digital technology. The result was bankruptcy in 2001.

Confirmation Bias: The tendency to notice and give greater weight to evidence that aligns with existing beliefs. For instance, you may favor the opinion of a long-time colleague over a new hire, even if the latter’s perspective is more accurate.

Anchoring: Relying heavily on the first piece of information received. In negotiations, the first number mentioned often sets the tone for the entire discussion. The adage "Whoever speaks first in a negotiation loses" actually gets it backwards. In fact, the person who first presents a number can set the direction of the negotiation by anchoring the price to an amount that is closer to their preference. Their opponent must then react to this "anchor" to continue the negotiation. That first number shapes everything that follows.

Practical Strategies to Improve Decision-Making

The following strategies can help you enhance the decision-making process in your organization:

The Pre-Mortem Approach

Prior to a final decision being made, pose to your team that the upcoming decision was wrong, leading to a failed project. Then ask them to generate and share ideas as to why the project failed.

The team should consider the potential points of misjudgment to make a more informed decision at the beginning of the project, avoiding potential failure. This single exercise can reveal the blind spots everyone was too polite to mention. You'll uncover assumptions that don't hold, risks you hadn't considered, and the fatal flaws that would have emerged months down the road.

Consider implementing this approach before you commit resources, not after.

Devil's Advocate

Leadership assigns someone to raise opposition to a decision or project that has strong support. The Devil's Advocate will generate opposition arguments to challenge assumptions and stimulate debate among the group.

This process helps participants overcome a reluctance in expressing concerns during the planning process.

Make it safe for people to disagree—you'll make better decisions as a result.

Modified Brainstorming

Rather than first introducing a topic for discussion at a meeting, notify your team about the question or concern in advance of the meeting. Encourage everyone to give serious thought to the topic and draft their own set of ideas, questions, and concerns to share with the group.

The meeting leader can compile the ideas and categorize them before sharing them with attendees. This provides team members time to think deeply about the questions and ensures that all ideas are put forward and not summarily dismissed.

The loudest voices in the room tend to dominate discussions to ensure that their ideas are heard and promoted, leaving some ideas unheard or dismissed due to the person having a less dominant personality or lower status in the organization. Weaker ideas are often chosen, leading to less optimal solutions. Modified brainstorming can help prevent this.

Cultivating an Environment That Supports Better Decisions

Individual strategies only go so far. The people in your organization either promote or hinder good decision-making, and this needs constant monitoring. Here are some ways to make sure you are setting the tone for making better decisions.

Create Psychological Safety for Honest Feedback

Can your employees provide honest feedback in the decision-making process even if that feedback goes against the opinions of leadership? When's the last time someone on your team told you that you were wrong or that something negative was happening without your knowledge?

Who can your employees approach with their concerns? How do you ensure you have not surrounded yourself with "yes people"?

Understand Behavior to Enable Change

Remember - behavior is situational. What would the world have to look like for someone's behavior to make sense? Rather than pushing people to change, ask why they're not doing it already. Make good behavior easier and bad behavior harder.

Recognize that beliefs are influenced and formed by people more than facts. We agree with people we like even if we don’t totally agree with the facts they present. There are identity beliefs that influence organizational decision-making and it's your responsibility to understand the people who work for you and how their behavior impacts the entire organization.

When to Trust Your Gut and When to Reason

When should you trust your gut, and when should you reason through every detail? Consider how much time you have to make the decision and how much is riding on it. What prior knowledge, education, and training helps prepare you to make an effective intuitive decision?

The key is this, logic fuels intuition.

Logical thinking helps us learn and identify patterns, which gradually become embedded in our subconscious. Logic often struggles to capture the thing intuition does so well—the human element involved in decisions. Certain situations are beyond just processing facts and numbers; understanding the emotional and psychological context could prove more important than just the numbers.

Yet the likely bias and lack of evidence in intuition-based conclusions is what makes it difficult for us to trust this framework for decision-making.

The best decisions are made when these two approaches are used together. A strong intuition can quickly carve a path out to a conclusion, while logic provides the system to validate this intuitive path, ultimately leading to a quick and confident decision.

Evaluate Your Decision Making to Identify Patterns

Are you making sure to evaluate your decision making to identify positive or negative patterns? It's difficult to remember every decision and what information went into the decision-making process. Create a decision log that tracks major decisions over time. Review this log on a regular basis to identify patterns in how you and your team make decisions. Track the following points:

• The decision and its context (What was decided? What circumstances prompted it?)

• Options considered and why others were rejected

• Who was involved in the decision-making process

• Time pressure or constraints that influenced the decision

• Personal motivations, biases, or external influences that may have played a role

• The reasoning and process you followed

• Unknown factors at decision time that emerged later

• The outcome and what you learned

Taking Action

Understanding and improving your decision-making process is essential for organizational success. What steps can you take to ensure better decision-making throughout your organization? How can you educate and empower your people to make more effective decisions that benefit stakeholders, stockholders, and anyone touched by your organization?

The decisions you make today shape your organization's tomorrow. Take the time to develop systematic approaches that help you and your people make better decisions consistently.

For more information on how DA Advisory Services can help develop customized strategies to overcome decision-making blind spots and increase your organization's effectiveness through a behavioral lens, please contact me. I look forward to helping you understand how decision-making behaviors affect your entire organization and develop strategies to ensure long-term success.