Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?

by James Heskett

In the last several years, a veritable tsunami of advice on how to make decisions has hit the Internet and what few shelves remain in our local bookstores. The advice is a distant relative of early ideas about decision theory in which we were advised to construct decision trees, mapping outcomes, attaching values to each one, and estimating probabilities that various combinations of outcomes might occur. Judgment entered into the construction of the resulting "decision trees," but the process itself was a way of injecting a certain amount of objectivity and analysis into the decision to be made.

In recent years, we have been advised to make certain decisions in a "blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, to "think twice" by Michael Mauboussin, and to think "fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman. The replacement of customs and biases with data, "big" or "small," has been intended, at least in part, to drive out such things as tradition, habit, and even superstition in endeavors ranging from child rearing to professional sports. After all, wasn't the book and film, Moneyball, at least in part a glorification of the triumph of statistics and probabilities over intuition and managerial judgment in professional baseball?

Two recent books add to the genre of advice on decision-making. One advises us how to make better decisions. The other helps us ensure that we don't allow our decisions to get sidetracked (or sidetrack them ourselves).

In their book Decisive, the Heath brothers cite four major reasons—all linked to common human traits—why we make poor choices and how to avoid doing it. They are: (1) the "narrow framing" of problems that makes us miss options; (2) the "confirmation bias" that leads us to give undue credence to information confirming a decision while ignoring other information; (3) the injection of "short-term emotion" into the decision process; and (4) overconfidence that we naturally display about the future (something that may be peculiar to only certain of the world's cultures, by the way).

They advise us to do such things as: (1) widen our options by emphasizing the "and" over the "or" in formulating them; (2) reality-test assumptions by reviewing them with more objective associates or making small tests; (3) seek ways of attaining distance by looking at a decision through someone else's eyes or focusing on the long-term impact of the decision; and (4) prepare to be wrong by setting limits on outcomes (similar to a "stop loss" order in stock trading).

Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino cites findings from her own research studies and those of her colleagues in her book Sidetracked, to warn us of three types of forces that derail our decisions: forces coming from within, from our relationships, and from the outside. Among those that emanate from within are an inaccurate and often inflated view of ourselves that leads us to treat advice inappropriately at the wrong times, "infectious emotion," and a tendency to adopt an overly narrow focus. To cope with these she suggests ways of achieving greater self-awareness (mitigating our biases by soliciting expensive advice, which we are more likely to take seriously, for example), taking our emotional temperature (determining when our feelings regarding a decision "were triggered by an event unrelated to the decision at hand"), and "zooming out" for broader perspective (for example, by asking "What information am I missing?").

I didn't Google the texts of these books, but there is no mention of the word "judgment" in their tables of contents or indexes, and I don't recall the use of the word in the texts. In fact, if there is a sense that one gets from all of this work, it is that we are our own worst enemies when it comes to making and implementing good decisions. We need tools to correct the errors and biases of our own judgment. This is puzzling, because we are frequently reminded that the ability to exercise judgment is what sets humans apart from other forms of life. (Perhaps judgment is what leads us to adopt recommendations such as those of these authors.) Is there still a role for judgment in decision-making? What do you think?