Making better decisions

McKinsey Quarterly's March 2010 study on the case for behvaioral strategy for making strategic decisions notes:

...very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power.

Suggestions for making better decisions, detailed in the article, include:

• Decide which decisions warrant the effort
• Identify the biases most likely to affect critical decisions 
• Select practices and tools to counter the most relevant biases
• Embed practices in formal processes

Bob Sutton, part of the faculty of the Stanford Advanced Project Management program), has many insightful posts about this. See Intution vs Data-driven Decision-making: Some Rough Ideas