Gleb Tsipursky - Never Go with Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Avoid Terrible Advice, Cognitive Biases, and Poor Decisions)

T he biggest falsehood in business leadership and career advice may also be the most repeated: Go with your gut. Surely you hear this advice often, as well as some variations, such as, Trust your instincts, Be authentic, Listen to your heart, or Follow your intuition.

I'm deeply frustrated, saddened, and angered when I see highly profitable companies, top-notch careers, and great business relationships devastated because someone bought into the toxic advice of going with their gut. Someone returning home from a guru's seminar and starting to behave like their authentic self shoots themselvesand their businessin the foot. Our authentic selves are adapted for the ancient savanna, not the modern business world. Following your intuition in today's professional environment can lead to terrible decisions. For the sake of our bottom lines, we need to avoid following our primitive instincts, and instead, be civilized about how we address the inherently flawed nature of our minds.

In your company, what percent of projects suffer from cost overruns? When was the last time a leader resisted necessary changes? How often are people on your team overconfident about the quality of their decisions? What proportion of workplace plans overemphasize smaller short-term gains over larger long-term ones? How frequently are people reluctant to discuss potentially serious issues? All of these problems, and many others, come from following our gut reactions. You can see a longer list of issues and evaluate their impact on your workplace in the assessment in .

If repeated frequently enough, these mistakes can and do result in disasters for successful companies and bring down high-flying careers, especially when they face smart competitors who educate themselves on and avoid such problems. By contrast, if you are the one to learn about and defend yourself from these errors, you can take advantage of rivals who go with their guts and make devastating mistakes, which enables you to gain a serious competitive edge.

Tragically, current business strategic assessments meant to address the weaknesses of human nature through structures and planning are deeply flawed. The most popular of them, SWOT, has a group of business leaders figure out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing their businesses. However, SWOT assessments usually fail to account for the dangerous judgment errors we make due to how our brain is wiredmistakes that are often exponentially increased in group settings. SWOT and similar strategic assessments give a false sense of comfort and security to business leaders who use them; these comforting techniques result in appalling oversights that ruin profitable businesses.