What about the intuition? When we have an intuition, we don’t have the facts. I think about arts like music, painting, cinema, etc. We have a feeling of something very strongly. We just feel very intensely what we have to do. We don’t proceed by facts but by an accurate feeling about sounds, images, movements, etc. We can have a mental representation of what it is about. We’re far from facts.

To come back to your example, the context of urgency came out of the fact you were lost. It made you afraid and not very receptive for a calm detached attitude. You decided to follow a person who represented the idee of leading. You felt something’s good with this guy. However, the history proved he was wrong because of the bad results you got.

I think the context of a decision is a crucial point. Making a decision for the next bar of a piece of music is not the same thing of making a decision for a navigational bar for a Website. The only similar thing is … making a decision…but the context is completely different.

The experience is another important point. But, i would need 2 days more… :)

Anyway, it’s a very interesting article. Thanks mister François.

To lead organizations, leaders need to surround themselves with the right experience. People who have been there, and know the pitfalls of bravado decisions. Then the team, not the leader, need to face, what Jim Collins calls the “brutal reality”. There is not much worse than making decisions on the wrong premises. But, you have to remember you will never have all the facts, and if you wait to have all the data, you will never make decisions and the organization will calcify. So at one point, when sufficient facts are know, you have to document your assumptions, and when the team believe the heading is right, you have to take a leap of faith to the next check point.

Remember, when you write a plan, you just gave God a good laugh.

Concerning dealing with uncertainties here are some empirical results relative to strategies applied by navy operators:
•Gathering more data(a good strategy, if there is time available).
•Making assumptions to fill data gaps (risky, but usually necessary).
•Waiting for situation to be resolved (sacrifices time).
•Ignoring the uncertainty and passing through (impulsive, but there are times, when it is necessary).
•Plan for the worst possible case (in this case uncertainty is managed by making sure the plan is sufficiently cautious to handle the situation).
•Increasing robustness of the plan (this is to be more cautious by taking actions.
•Being opportunistic (instead of trying to build a detailed plan, one accepts the uncertainties and prepares to improvise when the situation develops, pursuing the lines that are working best).
•Shaking the tree (Decision maker resolves the uncertainty by taking an action that requires a reaction).

Many of these points are consistent with this paper. However, sometime in real life situations there could be time constraints that could demand a quick decision and no time is available to gather data.Here, in my opinion the life experience, being expert in domain would be very important (it about being opportunistic, making assumptions to fill the gaps, etc.).