If you had to make this decision again in a year, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now?
One challenge executives face when reviewing a recommendation is the WYSIATI assumption: What you see is all there is. Because our intuitive mind constructs a coherent narrative based on the evidence we have, making up for holes in it, we tend to overlook what is missing. Devesh, for instance, found the acquisition proposal compelling until he realized he had not seen a legal due diligence on the target company’s patent portfolio—perhaps not a major issue if the acquisition were being made primarily to gain new customers but a critical question when the goal was to extend the product line.
To force yourself to examine the adequacy of the data, Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman suggests asking the question above. In many cases, data are unavailable. But in some cases, useful information will be uncovered.
From Before You Make That Big Decision… by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo & Olivier Sibony in Harvard Buisness Review. The idea is similar to Gary Klein’s idea of the pre-mortem. Both, in the style of ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ type questions, ask you to take a perspective which is less involved in the decision immediately in front of you, to facilitate exploration the counter-factual space around the way things are (or are as you imagine them), and to return with questions you didn’t think to ask previously.