Irrationality in Leadership - Trusting your gut
A set of brief segments from an McKinsey Interview with behaviorial economist Dan Ariely on the topic of irrationality in the workplace. My favorite clip from this set is on the topic of 'When to trust your Gut'. Basically you can trust your gut if with lots of experience AND if you can control all possible influences that might impact the outcome of the decision... his point being - experimentation is the key, and he asks a great question - why don't companies do more experimentation? We should always be testing leaps of faith. Organizational agility is the mindset needed to support this type of continuous experimentation. Agile software shops understand it. Yes, there are costs to experimentation but the early learnings more than outweigh any of the costs.
Ariely has written a couple of books on irrationality. One that I have read is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions - a really entertaining and worthwhile read.
