Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as a consultant, coach, speaker, trainer, and CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
You can sign up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.
When was the last time you saw a business disaster? Cutting-edge research shows that such problems usually result from poor strategic decisions when we go with our gut. We make bad strategic decisions in organizations largely due to the many dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars call cognitive biases. We also make such poor decisions in our personal financial decisions, as shown by a survey of consumer shopping behavior by Top10.
Fortunately, recent research in these fields has discovered strategies to realize when you’re falling into cognitive biases, as well as ways to defeat these dangerous judgment errors. “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” is one such strategy that I developed based on groundbreaking research. Then, I used it extensively in my consulting and coaching
- Step 1: Write out all the important attributes for your decision and put them into this web app.
- Step 2: Give weights to each of your attributes, from 1-10 on their importance (1 lowest importance, 10 highest).
- Step 3: Rank each option that you are considering choosing on all the attributes in the web app, from 1-10 on how good they are (1-poor, 10-great).
- Step 4: Using the web app, multiply weights by rankings to get an initial score.
- Step 5: Experiment with adjusting weights and rankings, but be cautious about trying to get the numbers to fit some predetermined choice.
- Step 6: Check for potential dangerous judgment errors, and adjust the numbers again.
- Step 7: Decide what kind of new evidence you would use to reconsider the decision.
- Step 8: Make your choice and stick with it.
