How middle leaders can help the boss get proper focus

Decision making is a fundamental part of all leadership levels. Pretty much everything I have read about it advises that time needs to be spent analysing data and interpreting outcomes. Falling back onto past actions is not always regarded as a good thing.

As Chris Griffiths points out in The Creative Thinking Handbook, the shortcuts that selective and reactive thinking provide will stifle innovation and hold back progress. There is plenty of evidence cited to support this. For example, Chris mentions Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ (2011) that brings our “thinking faults, heuristics and bias” to light.

So I was intrigued by MITSloan’s recent article (06 Sep) ‘The Potency of Shortcuts in Decision-Making’. It points out interesting research that suggests CEOs who make quick decisions based on heuristics often make better decisions than those who take a more “comprehensive” approach.

On the face of it, this is good news for those who only rely on direct experience to make decisions -and there are plenty that do. As David McRaney states in ‘How Minds Change’, it takes less energy. David points out that psychologist Andy Luttrell suggests that it is “costly to keep re-evaluating everything all the time”. We can see the logic.

However, as always, context is important.

I’m sure many will agree that there are times when a decision must be made immediately, or at least in a short time period.

As the MIT article authors Kruse, Bendig and Brettle point out, relying on rule of thumb (as heuristics can be briefly defined) works best in noisy and dynamic situations and where “information is scarce”. And, I suggest, when you simply have to get on with it.

Early in the MIT piece it seems to suggest that because we are in times when we are data rich, it’s knowing “how much is enough” and then knowing what to do with it that is important. This supports the ideas that:

• heuristics can save time because it cuts down on the careful analysis of increasingly huge sets of data
• adding more information is not always going to help.

This puts heuristics in a favourable light. But as Kruse, Bendig and Brettle point out, there is a strong chance that bias can creep in. They also argue that it is pointless to take shortcuts when a lot of objective data is readily available. Indeed, this is where McRaney’s citing of Chaiken and Eagly’s Heuristic-Systematic Model fits in. 

It is at this point where the middle leader can offer support to senior colleagues who like to dive straight in.