Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Like representativeness, availability encourages us to ignore alternatives.

for rapidly changing environments—balances a handful of simple but definite rules with the prevailing conditions. For example, priority rules help managers rank the opportunities they identify, or exit rules tell them when to leave a business. The rules make sure that managers uphold certain core ideals while recognizing changing conditions, allowi

Boeing’s problems with the 787 are symptomatic of the first decision mistake: embracing a strategy without fully understanding the conditions under which it succeeds or fails. Outsourcing is not universally good. For example, outsourcing does not make sense for products that require the complex integration of disparate subcomponents. The reason is

Financial incentives are generally easy to spot, but nonfinancial incentives, like reputation or fairness, are less obvious yet still important in driving decisions.

Think Twice’s value comes in situations where the stakes are sufficiently high and where your natural decision-making process leads you to a suboptimal choice.

Distortion of judgment. These subjects conclude that their perceptions are wrong and that the group is right. Distortion of action. These individuals suppress their own knowledge in order to go with the majority. Distortion of perception. This group is not aware that the majority opinion distorts their estimates.

In deciding, people often start with a specific piece of information or trait (anchor) and adjust as necessary to come up with a final answer. The bias is for people to make insufficient adjustments from the anchor, leading to off-the-mark responses. Systematically, the final answer leans too close to the anchor, whether or not the anchor is sensib

But increasing the number of dimensions also dilutes the relative strength of the high-resource player. As military strategists have known for years, increasing the number of battlefields often helps the underdog.

While a reduction in diversity does not guarantee a system change (although it does invoke invisible vulnerability), it substantially raises the probability.