The Decision Dilemma
Are You Choosing, Reacting, or Defaulting?
Most leaders like to think they’re making conscious, reasoned decisions. In reality, many of our choices are reflexes shaped by habits, patterns, and unseen biases that nudge us toward what feels familiar rather than what’s effective.
As Jack B. Soll, Katherine L. Milkman, and John W. Payne’s argue in their HBR piece, Outsmart Your Own Biases, we rely too heavily on intuition and flawed reasoning based in bias and heuristics. Yet we all know we can fight these bias triggers if we put our “mind” to it.
Most of us know that a bias is a mental shortcut that helps our brain move fast but not always accurately. Heuristics are the rules of thumb we use to simplify complexity. They save time, yet when unexamined, they can distort judgment.
To shift this state of ‘mind’ many of us have completed bias-awareness training, where we have nodded along, and yet once the training is over quietly slipped back into old habits.
Awareness is only the first step and awareness alone won’t shift patterns.
Recent research in the Journal of Management by Barbara Fasolo, Claire Heard, and Irene Scopelliti finds that while biases in organisational decision-making are well documented, actual interventions to mitigate them are far fewer. They argue that translation around the knowing-doing gap is real and fixable when we build interventions into how decisions are made.
Defaults also deserve our attention. A meta-analysis in Behavioural Public Policy by Jon M. Jachimowicz, Shannon Duncan, Elke U. Weber, and Eric J. Johnson shows decisions made with our default bias exert a strong and robust pull on behaviour. In other words, if we do not choose to improve our decision-making, the choice still happens based on our bais’ and heuristics. This defaulting is the real danger in complex work.
So, the shift we want and need is simple to say and powerful to practise while all the time requiring us to consciously move from defaulting or reacting into choosing.
To make this decision-shift we need to practice what is called debiasing.
These are techniques that turn awareness into disciplined decision habits so that we know when we are reacting and then choosing to improve the way we make decisions.
Here are a few ways to start:
Speak your reasoning aloud. Hearing your thinking out loud exposes the shortcuts you didn’t realise you were taking.
List options on purpose. Force at least three viable paths then ask what would make the opposite true. This widens your frame and response to the challenge
Zoom out, then zoom in. Take a balcony view before you commit. This interrupts narrow framing and anchors you into the context or situation you are experiencing
Run a “what if” test. Challenge your preferred choice by imagining a different approach and its success conditions
Prepare for contigencies. Decide in advance how you will pivot if a signal/s change, so you can then act with speed and calm.
Take an AND approach. Take a playful approach to the situation by applying AND to every point or objection you come up with as a response to the situation.
Use an accountability buddy. Give them permission to challenge your process, not your competence, and to call the bias. They can help you spot the pattern you’re blind to.
Ask “What’s that about?” — repeatedly. Pose the same question three or four times. Each layer takes you closer to the trigger behind your reaction.
Name the moment. Before deciding, ask whether you’re choosing, reacting, or defaulting. The act of naming builds a pause into your process.
While these are small ways we can individually change we also need to think about bigger leaps in the way we make decisions. Behavioural science tells us that micro-habits, those repeated, deliberate adjustments, are what make new thinking and better decisions stick.
According to Actionable’s global leadership data on habit builders, when we set purposeful behavioural intent and track it, 76% of those people working on a habit builder show a sustained uplift in positive leadership practice.
In short: shift from defaulting or reacting to choosing. That’s a real Decision-shift!