Strategy is much less about objective and rational analysis and a whole lot more about the ability to filter out the noise without killing the human energy required for execution.
I always knew aggression and bullying were losing tactics — but I was surprised to find them operating as a common leadership strategy across organizations of every size, from Fortune 500 boardrooms to one-person operations with a handful of support staff.
Here’s the illusion most of us carry into every strategy meeting: rational decision-making is a straight line — objective analysis in, sound strategy out. Add algorithms for precision, sprinkle in experience for wisdom, and you’re done.
The reality is messier. Experience doesn’t make the line straighter. In most cases, it makes it harder to see.
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discovered that when experienced professionals evaluate identical cases independently, their judgments diverge by up to 60%. He called this noise — and it gets worse, not better, with experience.
Experts don’t filter noise. They just become more confident that they’re right.
Consultants Bradley, Hirt, and Smit found something equally unsettling — the more detailed the information you have, the more your confidence grows, and the higher your risk of arriving at the wrong conclusion.
The question I can’t shake — if experience doesn’t filter noise and algorithms only replace one kind of bias with another, what actually enables people to rally toward execution when leadership is working against them?