Two subjects, one preoccupation: how people convince themselves they understand something.
10 articles
Senior leaders rarely fail because they lack intelligence or effort. More often, they fall into predictable reasoning traps created by organisational structures, cognitive bias, and the pressures of executive decision-making. Understanding these mistakes is essential for building reflective leadership.
Internal reporting systems are designed to give leaders visibility into organisational reality. Yet the structure of incentives, hierarchy, and narrative alignment often transforms these systems into mechanisms that reinforce reassuring interpretations rather than reveal uncomfortable truths.
Corporate strategy often emerges through narrative rather than analysis. While narratives simplify complexity and coordinate action, dominant strategic stories can distort evidence, reinforce assumptions, and produce “narrative capture,” where strategy becomes harder to question.
Senior leaders operate under constant pressure to act quickly, yet many of the world’s most influential executives deliberately carve out time for reflection to protect decision quality and strategic judgement.
Past investment often distorts executive judgement, turning persistence into entrapment and making strategic withdrawal feel like failure even when changing course is the most rational decision.
Leaders are expected to make rational decisions, yet intuition and experience heavily influence judgement. Understanding the limits of intuition and validating perspectives can improve decision quality.
Confirmation bias can cause leaders to overweight agreeable evidence, dismiss warnings, and lock organisations into costly strategic errors—especially under uncertainty and status pressure.
When authority is delegated, misaligned incentives and information asymmetry can distort decision-making and undermine trust within organisations.
Survivorship bias occurs when conclusions are drawn from successful cases while failures are overlooked, leading to systematically distorted judgements.
The Socratic method is often more effective than direct challenge because it reduces defensiveness, exposes assumptions, and encourages genuine belief revision.
Good. That is rather the point. Tell me where it goes wrong.