A Fundamental Decision Making Flaw in Public Officials

As we face another Presidential election and think about the
candidates operating in the well-known bubble of the White House, I
thought it worth updating and reposting a piece from four years ago, a month before the last election.

The question I asked: Are our public leaders flawed because they were selected as public leaders?

Just a few weeks ago, an article
in Fortune reminded me of this question and the phenomenon that answers
the question.  Its author, Rita Gunther McGrath, noted that:

“In
almost every disaster, you find the leaders based their decision-making
on assumptions…  A fundamental flaw in most governmental policy-making
is that those making the deals and decisions think they are operating
with facts.  The reality is that they are operating instead with
assumptions, many deeply held, about what causes what to happen.  A
policy is really a statement of assumed causality, and the law of
unintended consequences is ever-present.”

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The downside of a chief executive’s view of reality – i.e.,
assumptions – is made worse by the typical over-confidence such
positions encourage.

The popular title and sub-title of the paper
by Professor Kelly E. See of NYU and three other academic researchers
on organizational behavior, which I originally cited, make the point:
“The Decision-Making Flaw in Powerful People: Overflowing with
confidence, many leaders turn away from good advice.”

Some of their key findings:

“This
paper finds a link between having a sense of power and having a
propensity to give short shrift to a crucial part of the decision-making
process: listening to advice.  Power increases confidence which can
lead to an excessive belief in one’s own judgment and ultimately to
flawed decisions.  …

"In addition to confirming the previous
experiments’ finding that more powerful people were less likely to take
advice and were more likely to have high confidence in their answers,
this final experiment showed that high-power participants were less
accurate in their answers than low-power participants.”

A related paper by a different group of researchers, led by USC Professor Nathanael J. Fast adds some nuance to this finding:

“Experiencing
power leads to overconfident decision-making.  The findings, through
both mediation and moderation, also highlight the central role that the
sense of power plays in producing these decision-making tendencies.

“First,
sense of power, but not mood, mediated the link between power and
overconfidence.  Second, the link between power and overconfidence was
severed when access to power was not salient to the powerful and when
the powerful were made to feel personally incompetent in their domain of
power.

“These findings indicate that only when objective power
leads people to feel subjectively powerful does it produce overconfident
decision-making.”

Unfortunately, the last finding doesn’t much
change the fundamental situation for Presidents, who are extraordinarily
powerful, except maybe when they deal with scientific issues that are
not part of their self-image – and, even then, the position lends
greater credence to their views than may be warranted.

Professor See and colleagues provided some advice about overcoming this problem:

"For
one thing, organizations could formally include advice gathering at the
earliest stages of the decision-making process, before powerful
individuals have a chance to form their own opinions.  Encouraging
leaders to refrain from commenting on decisions publicly could also keep
them from feeling wedded to a particular point of view.”

Whether
or not you might find this research conforms to your own experience, the
last point — gathering in lots of information before public leaders
decide — is a reasonable and feasible suggestion to improve decision
making in many cases.  Today, the Internet and the collaborative
discussion tools it offers can make this happen fairly easily.

The
question is whether the next President will put in place that kind of open platform
for advice or wrongly trust the assumptions that she/he brought into the Oval
Office.

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights
Reserved

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