500 Words a Week - What makes a good decision maker?

A recent paper by Wilson and Kiely discusses how to develop decision making expertise. Within this paper they touch on work by Tetlock, which will be mentioned below.

Before we look at the traits of a good decision maker, we must be aware of what makes a poor one and how to avoid these traps.

In a previous 20-year study, looking at nearly 30,000 predications from 284 subject experts, Tetlock assessed the accuracy of experts’ probability judgements. The study highlighted the limitations of human forecasting ability, specifically illustrating that overconfidence, hindsight bias and self-serving counterfactual reasoning were prevalent among experienced experts. The study showed that experts typically overinflated their forecasting abilities and the accuracy of their predictions. “As Tetlock noted, expert judgements were about as accurate as a dart throwing chimpanzee.” What this shows is that experience alone does not automatically equate to good decision making, and that poor decision-making stems from our own overconfidence for our predictions, and our self-serving bias of moulding information to suit our narrative.

When looking at good decision makers, Tetlock characterized these as pragmatic experts who drew on many tools, sources and perspectives to gather as much information as possible before forming subsequent judgements or decisions. Some of the top traits shared by these good decision makers were an eagerness to question beliefs, to investigate different perspectives, to be open minded, to welcome opposing viewpoints, to think in probabilities and possibilities, and a willingness to readily admit when they were wrong and quickly move on. Almost the opposite of what makes a poor decision maker. Can we separate ourselves from ego, our own inflated views of our knowledge and look to others, to take on different perspectives and be willing to be wrong.

Wilson and Kiely remind us that high performers viewed forecasting and decision-making not as inevitable outcomes of experience alone, but rather as a set of skills requiring deliberate practice, sustained effort, constant monitoring and continual accumulation and scrutiny of emerging evidence.

For people to then learn from their environment and improve their decision-making capabilities, they need experiential exposure and access to timely and reliable feedback. Either this feedback comes from experienced people we work with, or it must come internally through intensive and critical reflection on our experiences.

We must be careful however, as Wilson and Kiely discuss; “true expertise, accordingly, depends upon a capacity to recognise when intuition is useful, and when is it misleading”. We must learn to catch our bias when it looks to influence our decisions, and remain open to other perspective and viewpoints.