Why Leaders Need To Heed Their Inner Voices When Making Decisions

It is widely acknowledged that decision-making is a key skill for effective leaders. Indeed, a lot of effort goes into helping those in business develop various aspects of the skill as they progress through their careers. These range from analyzing the problem through winning over employees to ensuring that what is decided upon actually happens. And yet examples of poor decision-making abound.

The corporate world is full of them. In the introduction to their new book, Wise Decisions, Jim Loehr and Sheila Ohlsson Walker list just a few — including Motorola deciding against smartphones, Excite not purchasing Google for $750,000, Ross Perot passing on Microsoft, Decca Records turning down the Beatles. And then there are those where senior executives don’t just get it wrong, they actually do wrong with catastrophic consequences, as with Enron, WorldCom and others.

But there are also plenty of instances elsewhere. How many times do we hear of politicians and others in public life doing things either personally or in their role in government that cause us to ponder: “Why did they think that was a good idea?” Only recently, a police force in the U.K. has had its judgement questioned over information in revealed about its investigation into a woman’s mysterious disappearance. “Surely,” you think to yourself, “they would have thought about how that would sound before going public.” Sometimes, it seems that — despite all the bureaucracy, meetings and procedures that characterize most organizations — people in charge (who through experience and training really should know better) decide things off the top of their heads.

Some insight into why this happens is provided by Loehr and Ohlsson Walker’s fascinating book. Sub-titled “A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices,” it goes a good way towards explaining why so many of the decisions we make in everyday life as well as at work are poor or at least ill-considered. Loehr, who has been involved in leadership development for more than 30 years and has written numerous books, and Ohlsson Walker, a behavioral geneticist, point out that at least part of the problem is that we are having to make so many decisions that we suffer from “choice overload” — there are simply too many options, decisions or choices to take in. “All decision-making,” they write, “consumes energy, and the more we care about the outcome, the more our bodies expend energy (e.g. accelerated heart rate). Eventually, our mental and emotional energy reserves become depleted with the consequence of hitting the proverbial decision-making wall.” Accordingly, getting enough rest and physical exercise and eating and drinking properly can help us make better choices.

At the same time, though, the authors stress that our best intentions can be undone by our brains, which are set up to “get us what we want from life and can deploy a surprising number of ingenious reality-distorting strategies to do just that.” These mechanisms include such familiar concepts as motivated reasoning, or a nonconscious way of reasoning away contradictions that do not support the desired conclusions; confirmation bias, or giving greater weight to information that supports pre-existing perceptions, beliefs and desires; cognitive dissonance, or the tendency to reduce tension and psychological distress by nonconsciously altering conflicting information so that discomfort is reduced or even eliminated. With such powerful forces at work, it is perhaps hardly surprising that individuals get into debt buying cars or houses they cannot really afford — or that chief executives, for instance, embark on acquisitions that turn out to be disastrous.

But it does not have to be that way. Using the increasing knowledge scientists have about the brain and human behaviour, Loehr and Ohlsson Walker demonstrate how individuals and teams can become better at decision-making and so opt for wise choices. The actions recommended range from establishing daily habits that improve physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health, through understanding that individual perceptions of the world around them are simply interpretations and so are subjective and assuming that most incoming data is in some partially or completely flawed to vetting important decisions through such lenses as life purpose, core values and beliefs and life mission. Standing behind them all, though, is the rather more basic concept of what we commonly refer to as “our inner voice” but which the authors call YODA, or Your Own Decision Advisor. And, as with the other actions recommended, this can be trained and developed so that it becomes an “inner resident coach and master decision maker.”