Businesses
Decide faster. Judge better. Follow through.
Business processes fail far more often because of how information is assessed, risks are evaluated and decisions are made under uncertainty than because of any lack of expertise.
Cognitive biases distort priorities, overconfidence pushes investments in the wrong direction, and groupthink stops critical objections from ever reaching the table. This does not happen in poor teams. It happens in good ones, which is precisely why it goes unnoticed for so long.
I help executive teams and senior leadership identify these patterns and protect decision quality where losing it costs most.
Where judgement quality breaks down in practice
Strategic decisions and investments
CEOs systematically overestimate the likelihood of success in investments and acquisitions (Malmendier & Tate, 2005).
Overconfidence bias leads to risks being underestimated and opportunities being overweighted. At the same time, the planning fallacy means that costs and timelines for new projects are consistently set too low.
Together, these produce resource allocations built on false assumptions. This usually only becomes apparent once the course is difficult to correct. Those who are optimistic about the outcome scrutinise the underlying assumptions less carefully.
The result is decisions that appear convincing internally and are hard to justify to anyone outside.
Hiring and personnel decisions
Hiring decisions are particularly susceptible to confirmation bias, similarity effects and unstructured assessment.
Confirmation bias means that interviewers look for what they expect to find, and find it. The similarity effect means that candidates who resemble the decision-maker are favoured, without anyone being aware of it. Unstructured processes reinforce both, because they impose no objective points of comparison.
Structured criteria and explicit evaluation processes reduce these biases measurably. They are still rarely applied consistently, because the effort involved is more immediately felt than the benefit. By the time a poor hire becomes visible, months have passed and any connection to the original decision has long since been severed.
Group dynamics and collective judgement
Groupthink and pressure for consensus arise in leadership teams through implicit signals, for instance who speaks first, which arguments carry weight, or who stays silent. Authority bias compounds this, as assessments from high-status individuals are given disproportionate weight, even when their information base is no different from anyone else's.
Where doubts cannot or will not be voiced, the information base deteriorates long before that shows up in actual decisions (Edmondson, 1999). Values statements and culture initiatives cannot fix this.
What is needed are processes that actively incorporate dissenting views before a direction is set. Without those processes, the team makes decisions based on the information that became visible, not on the information that would have been relevant.
Succession and transition
Business succession is not a straightforward transactional process. Identity, control, family dynamics and financial interests all converge at once.
Status quo bias makes it hard to let go of a familiar situation, even when the case for change is clear. Loss aversion compounds this, as potential losses weigh more heavily in subjective terms than equivalent gains. And the sunk cost fallacy keeps owners in structures and roles they would rather leave, because too much has been invested to stop.
All three mechanisms reinforce one another, often amplified further by personal history and relationship dynamics that appear in no balance sheet.
What looks like a communication or structural problem is almost always a judgement problem in disguise. Some decisions are postponed because they do not feel right, even when the facts are clear. Others are made too quickly, just to end the uncertainty.
Both have a cost, just of different kinds. And because successions rarely offer a second chance, the price of poor decision architecture is particularly high here.
Read more about business successions here.
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Malmendier, U., & Tate, G. (2008). Who makes acquisitions? CEO overconfidence and the market’s reaction. Journal of Financial Economics, 89(1), 20–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2007.07.002
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Sibony, O. (2020). You’re about to make a terrible mistake: How biases distort decision-making and what you can do to fight them. Brown Spark.
Wiese, C. W., Burke, C. S., Tang, Y., Hernandez, C., & Howell, R. (2022). Team Learning Behaviors and Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Direct Effects and Moderators. Group & Organization Management, 47(3), 571–611. https://doi.org/10.1177/10596011211016928
How I work
I work where competence is not in question, but where systematic judgement traps are undermining decision quality.
To do that, I make cognitive biases and group dynamics tangible within the client's own context, drawing on real cases and research findings. From there, we develop together the evaluation standards, decision criteria and reflection formats that actually hold up in day-to-day leadership practice.
Short formats
A 20-minute input for internal training or professional events
A 30 to 60-minute keynote, with or without Q&A
Workshops
90 to 180 minutes, interactive and case-based
Suited to executive boards and leadership teams who want to identify and work through specific bias patterns in their own practice.
Advisory
Strategic sparring and ongoing advisory work for executive teams, as well as facilitated clarification sessions for decision-making groups at critical junctures.
Who this is for
This work is for executive teams and senior leadership who want to understand why well-functioning people still make predictably poor judgements.
It is particularly relevant in phases where high uncertainty and high stakes coincide, such as growth, restructuring and succession. But also in the ordinary flow of leadership, where the same judgement traps take effect in the same meeting rooms again and again, without anyone naming them.
If you recognise that your real bottlenecks lie not in knowledge but in how information is assessed and decisions are made, this is the right place.
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