Judgment & decision-making
How people decide with incomplete information, competing incentives and consequences that cannot be modeled away.
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Insights
Ideas should survive examination.
The subject changes because the underlying questions are rarely confined to a single discipline.
What interests me is the point at which surface differences become less important than the mechanisms beneath them—the incentives, assumptions, probabilities, patterns, cognitive errors, structural constraints and human behaviors that recur whether the setting is a company, an aircraft, a golf course, a negotiation, a piece of technology or a personal decision.
This page sets out the intellectual territory beneath the work: the questions I return to, the distinctions I find useful and the standards against which I test a conclusion.
Questions I return to
The categories are convenient. The boundaries are not.
Risk & probability
The difference between calculated exposure, unsupported confidence and the false comfort of hindsight.
Business & technology
Strategy, capital, systems, artificial intelligence and the organizational behavior hidden inside technical problems.
Human factors & leadership
Why expertise does not eliminate bias, how incentives shape behavior and when consensus becomes self-reinforcing.
Golf, music & performance
Disciplines in which preparation matters, uncertainty remains and accountability cannot be delegated.
Pattern & lateral reasoning
What one field can reveal about another once inherited categories stop determining what is visible.
What the fields reveal
Different settings. Recurring structures.
A question about leadership may ultimately be a question about incentives; a technological problem may be organizational rather than technical; a discussion of risk may become an examination of psychology; and something learned through golf can illuminate decision-making in business more precisely than another business framework.
Outcome is not the same as decision quality
Good decisions occasionally produce poor outcomes because uncertainty exists, while bad decisions are occasionally rewarded because luck is equally real. Once outcome becomes the sole measure of judgment, success begins teaching the wrong lessons and failure becomes more informative than it deserves to be.
The more useful examination begins earlier: how the problem was framed, which assumptions survived, what evidence was available, which variables mattered, what remained unknowable, what incentives influenced the participants and whether the eventual choice made sense given what could reasonably have been known at the time.
Intelligence and error coexist remarkably well
Highly capable people anchor to bad information, protect sunk costs, overestimate competence, misinterpret evidence and defend positions because abandoning them would injure identity. Expertise can reduce some vulnerabilities while amplifying others, particularly once accumulated knowledge begins conferring immunity from challenge.
Organizations exhibit the same tendencies collectively. A poor assumption repeated by enough competent people can acquire institutional legitimacy; consensus can be mistaken for evidence; familiarity can be mistaken for safety; and a decision can survive long after its original rationale has vanished.
The relationship between variables is often the real problem
A business problem may resemble an aviation problem once the surface details are removed. A negotiation can behave like a systems problem. A technical failure may be better understood through human factors than engineering. Golf can illuminate investing because both demand the separation of process from outcome; music can illuminate organizations because meaning in both emerges from relationships among components.
Such comparisons are useful only when the structural correspondence survives scrutiny. When it does, a problem that appeared unique can become considerably easier to understand—and a conventional answer can be tested against evidence drawn from more than one inherited category.
The discipline
Better questions tend to survive longer than fashionable answers.
An intuition can remain comfortably vague for years. An argument committed to language has nowhere to hide.
Its assumptions become visible, its gaps become embarrassing and the elegant idea that seemed persuasive in one’s head occasionally proves less impressive once forced to survive a paragraph. That exposure is useful; the same principle governs the advisory work.
The objective is not to appear certain. It is to examine the problem carefully enough that whatever conclusion remains has earned more authority than the one with which the examination began.