Often wrong, never in doubt: Mitigating leadership overconfidence in decision-making

Abstract

Leaders are often celebrated for quick and decisive actions. Such actions include the ability to cut through the chaff and make rapid decisions in fast-paced environments. However, while decisiveness is admirable, poor decision-making is not. And an increasing amount of research informs us that leaders tend to be far too overconfident about their decision-making ability. First, this article details several ways that leaders’unconscious cognitive biases can cloud their decision-making ability. These biases such as attribution bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planning fallacy, and jumping to faulty conclusions are particularly dangerous because everyone is infected by them—yet, because of the bias blind spot, leaders tend to naturally believe they are immune. Second, this article details ways that leaders can “mistake proof” their decision-making process. By exercising activities like pre-mortems, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, reference class forecasting, and improving reflective capacity, leaders can impose systems and methods to help protect their decision-making against their greatest potential nemesis—themselves.