3 Decision-Making traps to avoid for business success

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

People are key to success.
Which means some great people can lead to successful projects as well as some other people will unconsciously but predictably lead to failure.

How to recognize who is who?
Well, digging deeper we can understand that there are not always 100% good people and 100% bad people, yet there are good behaviors and bad behaviors, smart patterns and dummy antipatterns.
If this was a role play, there would be at least 3 macro categories in every business, organizations or society that show some traits or behaviors related to decision-making.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Steve Jobs

Top incompetents

Many executives, directors, company owners, or even clients are incompetent yet demand to take decisions on behalf of competent, experienced and skilled people.
When the client thinks to know more than a qualified builder and builder thinks to know more than a qualified engineer, failure, tragedy or corruption will occur.
The problem this cause is that predictably irrational and opportunistic decisions are made without following systemic, analytical, data-driven approaches.
Each and every decision is based on personal biases, superstition, gut-feelings, sedimented ideas, old habits, wrong perception, false assumptions, blindness, fear, stress, homeostasis, laziness…
These type of decision makers can be poisonous by promoting, inspiring and tolerating toxic behaviors, dissatisfaction, frustration, disengagement, HIPPO (Highest Paid Person Opinion) bias or fear of higher-rank people.
Having a very high opinion of themselves, they feel they are humble when showing their fake and false modesty, yet they ultimately behave like they are true experts in everything: they think they are in the positions of judging technical, scientific, professional, SME (subject-matter experts) and any sort of disputes.
But again, these judgements will be often and mainly based on predictably irrational fallacies.
Their arrogance and ignorance blind them and make them the major contributors to self-fulfilling prophecies of failures.