Knowledge workers often think they produce emails (and meetings), but this misses something fundamental.
As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman explained to journalist Jason Zweig, what knowledge workers really produce are decisions.
The quality and impact of these decisions vary enormously.
(At many financial institutions) the product is decisions. They produce decisions. And there ought to be something that is equivalent to the quality control you find in manufacturing. Now you can’t control the product itself; test the product. But you can test the process by which the product was created. So there are questions you can ask about the process by which a judgment was made or a decision was made. And one of these aspects is going to be the quality and quantity of the information on which the judgment was based. And if you isolate that as one of the issues you are going to focus on, it’s not the quality of the story you can make, it’s actually ‘Where does the evidence come from?’, ‘What do we really know?’ It’s when you ask those questions that you work out that, actually, you know very little and that you told yourself a coherent story on the basis of inadequate information.
While individuals struggle to assess their past decisions objectively, organizations can evaluate decision-making systematically through consistent frameworks. Without such frameworks, people default to ad hoc approaches, making it challenging for organizations to identify good judgment and learn from experience. Research shows that having a robust decision-making process matters more than gathering additional information or conducting deeper analysis.
Still curious? Check out the guide to making smart decisions, without getting lucky.