Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Disorientation and Decision Analysis

Faced with too much information and not enough understanding, people and organizations begin to grasp at fleeting pieces of certainty and take actions that make sense in such a context. The colloquialism “hindsight is always 20/20” is used to justify those decisions that fail, with the excuse being that only the perfect foresight gained from actually experiencing the future could have delivered sufficient information and insight. But the trouble is that, by perceiving the future and the world as inherently unknowable, we too often end up with, to paraphrase the quip about the Vietnam War, one logical decision after another that when put together spell disaster.

So what are the most common reactions to information overload and confused perception? I submit that there are four:

• When faced with a complex, confusing, and constantly changing world, people and organizations freeze and take no action. One of the more gripping images illustrating this behavior is the reaction of George W. Bush when informed of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Reportedly for a solid seven minutes he was transfixed by an event the ramifications of which were simply beyond immediate comprehension. (Bush, of course, did ultimately take fairly dramatic action—but some would argue that this action was subject to the failings of point number three, below.) The shortcomings here are obvious—freezing and delaying yields missed opportunities for purposeful action, ...