Avoiding the Trap

Managers often make decisions on the basis of intuition that brings comfort and efficiency to a legacy-based decision process. They often fail to bring in facts to validate decisions, leading to a high hidden cost of intuition. We suggest that these managers should pause and ask questions of their mental models in order to test the relevance and appropriateness of their intuition. Otherwise, a lack of continuous verification of mental models can lead to a destructive cycle that can ultimately trap organizations into suboptimal and sometimes even disastrous decision making.