HBR Slow Deciders Make Better Strategists

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JULY 08, 2016
ARTICLE
STRATEGY
Slow Deciders Make
Better Strategists
by Mark Chussil
This article is licensed to you, Shamel Janbek of Hewlett Packard, for your personal use through 2018-10-31. Further posting, copying or distribution is not permitted. Copyright 2016-07-08
Harvard Business Publishing. All rights reserved.
STRATEGY
Slow Deciders Make

Better Strategists
by Mark Chussil
JULY 08, 2016
There are many ways to split people into two groups. Young and old. Rich and poor. Us and them.
The 98% who can do arithmetic and the 3% who cannot. Those who split people into two groups and
those who don’t.
Then there’s the people who make good competitive-strategy decisions, and those who don’t.
It’s not easy to split people into the good/bad strategy decision-makers. Track records are useful but
they’re not unambiguous, and those getting started have no track records at all. General intelligence
and business degrees seem to be good signs, but smart people with business degrees don’t agree on
COPYRIGHT © 2016 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2
what works in strategy. Veterans with specific industry expertise look promising, but so do outsiders
with new ideas.
What about mindset? We know people put credence in confidence. However, it seems to me there’s a
difference between someone who’s confident after laboring over a thoughtful decision and someone
who’s confident with a snap judgment. It seems to me there’s a difference between someone who’s
unsure after serious contemplation and someone who’s unsure about a quick pick.
Imagine that we can record decision-makers’ solutions to a competitive-strategy problem. We also

ask how confident they feel that they’ve found a good answer and how long it took them to find it.
We can categorize them, then, like this:
I’ve got such a database of people, those who have entered the Top Pricer Tournament. The database
includes business executives, consultants, professors, and students. I gave all of them the same
unfamiliar but straightforward pricing-strategy problem.
Dozens of Tournament entrants said they were very confident in their strategies after making a fast
decision, dozens said they were very confident after a slow decision, and so on. The phrases in the
boxes are how I interpret the mindsets of the people in those boxes. In the analysis below I’ll leave
out the respondents in the “I guessed” box because they seem unrepresentative of what happens in
real life, where strategists work at strategy decisions until they’re confident in their answers or
they’ve worked long enough to conclude they’re not going to make further progress.
In general, the I-already-knows, confident in their snap judgments, and the Now-I-knows, confident
after pondering, tend to be older males. Male business students are also represented in the I-already-
knows. The I-don’t-knows, unsure of their thoughtful decisions, tend to be somewhat younger. And
females make up well over half of the I-don’t-knows, a much higher percentage than in the other
mindsets.
Make your prediction: which of the three styles selected the best-performing Tournament strategies?
The best-performing group: the I-don’t-knows.
Perhaps it’s about age: we gain confidence over time, but maybe not skill. Perhaps it’s about gender:
rather than the conventional wisdom that females don’t have enough confidence, maybe males have
too much. I don’t have enough data yet to assess those hypotheses. And perhaps the results will
change as the sample sizes grow.
Still, the I-don’t-knows’ success fits my business war-gaming experience.
In one case, the new vice president of a troubled business brought together about thirty managers,
each with decades in the business. The managers considered the war game an amusing waste of time.
They all knew the answer already, they said, and no other options were possible. Then, role-playing
their business and its competitors, they discovered that their already-known answer simply would
not work. The managers suddenly found new options. We war-gamed one, and it worked, and they
rolled it out in real life, and it worked. The new VP got promoted.
It’s not that the managers didn’t care or were incompetent; it’s that they were overconfident. When
you think you know the answer, you sincerely believe it’s a waste of time to keep looking for it. It
feels like continuing to search for your keys after you’ve found them.
I think the essential lesson for competitive-strategy decision-makers is not so fast, in both senses of
the phrase: take your time and don’t be so sure. That’s the mindset used by the new VP and the I-
don’t-knows.
The willingness to apply that mindset is what separates the good decision-makers from the bad.
Author note: I’d like to expand the Tournament database. I offer use of the Tournament in confidence
and at no charge to faculty in business schools and executive-education programs, and to facilitators at
corporate universities and management-development programs. Please contact me at
TopPricer@DecisionTournaments.com.
Mark Chussil is the Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc. He has conducted business war games,
taught strategic thinking, and written strategy simulators for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

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REPRINT H02Z2Y

Slow Deciders Make

Imagine that we can record decision-makers’ solutions to a competitive-strategy problem. We also

The best-performing group: the I-don’t-knows.

Still, the I-don’t-knows’ success fits my business war-gaming experience.

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