10 Decision-Making Traps

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Topics: Decision Making, Knowledge Management, Leadership, Lessons Learned, ProjectsAtWork

Meetings are most often the setting for engaging new ideas, confirming previous positions and making important decisions. But there are a number of common psychological traps that can sabotage the process and the decision-making of well-intentioned project leaders, including dissonance, rationalization and circular causation.

Being human, people tend to justify their ideas and positions, but their efforts to justify them can lead to judgmental behavior, thinking patterns that stay in unproductive ruts, and other patterns that may interfere with the goals of their organization. These are the same fallibilities that scientists have to be alert for in doing their research. The difference is that in science there is a long tradition of checking for these problems, while in most other organizations there is no such safety mechanism.

Good project leaders will train themselves to listen for any of the following mechanisms being used to justify someone’s position at their meetings. So be on the lookout for these common traps:

1. Dissonance

Why is it often hard to change your mind about a previously made decision? What mechanism keeps a company turning out the same product the same way (prizing consistency), only to be defeated by another organization with a new approach or a tweak on the product design?

The psychological mechanism is called dissonance. …

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