Two systems, one problem
Fast, intuitive System 1 thinking runs most of your day, and for routine calls that is fine. But strategic decisions made at System 1 speed inherit its flaws: confirmation bias seeks evidence you are already right, overconfidence understates the odds you are wrong, anchoring traps you in old assumptions, sunk cost keeps bad bets alive, and the planning fallacy convinces you it will all be done by Q3.
The briefing walks through each bias with leadership examples: the acquisition that confirmed what the CEO wanted to believe, the roadmap anchored to last year’s strategy, the segment nobody would exit because of what had been invested.
The practices that catch them
- State beliefs with confidence levels. "I am 70% confident" invites challenge; a bare assertion invites silence.
- Seek disconfirming evidence. Assign someone to argue the other side before you commit.
- Run pre-mortems. Imagine the decision failed, then explain why. Risks you were suppressing surface fast.
- Create space for System 2. Big calls deserve deliberate thought, not corridor decisions.
These practices are the foundation the rest of the Strategy track builds on: they make every later choice, from valuation to full strategy formulation, more honest.
Why smart teams decide badly
The deepest bias in business decision-making is not a personality flaw, it is a category error: applying the logic of the predictable world to the part of the world that can be otherwise. Markets, customers and competitors do not repeat the past, so historical data is not a representative sample of the future, however sophisticated the analysis run on it. That argument, the foundation of everything else, is the Aristotle Distinction.
The methodology connection
The practical antidote is to argue about conditions instead of opinions: What Would Have to Be True converts conviction into testable assumptions and strips seniority out of the verdict. For generating options your current frame cannot see, the anomaly engine in possibility portraits is built precisely to catch what analysis discards. And an outside voice remains the cheapest bias correction available, because the outsider is paid to not need the answer to be anything, the argument of the human layer.