Debiased Decision Making  577 Groupthink Groups of decision makers have a tendency to engage in groupthink, a focus on harmony and consensus. This can get in the way of examining all the op- tions objectively, leading to weaker—and sometimes disastrous—decisions. Consider the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba during U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s administration. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of Kennedy’s advisers, wrote this about his participation in the debate leading up to the humiliating defeat of U.S.-backed Cuban exiles trying to overthrow the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro: “In the months after the Bay of Pigs I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent in the Cabinet Room . . . . I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the cir- cumstance.”5 A variation on this failing occurs when participants don’t speak up be- cause they feel the subject under discussion does not fall into their area of responsibility or expertise. At one global agriculture company, the members of the executive committee tended to speak up during strategy conversations only if their area of the business was being discussed. The tacit assumption was that colleagues wouldn’t intrude on other colleagues’ area of responsibil- ity—an assumption that deprived the committee of their insights. The weight of evidence strongly supports that decisions are better when there is rigorous debate. One research effort found that for big-bet decisions, high-quality debate led to decisions that were 2.3 times more likely to be suc- cessful.6 Extensive study has explored the importance of vigorous debate in improving decision making.7 There is a reason why some U.S. Supreme Court justices have hired clerks with different political views than their own: it helps to ensure that their own thinking remains rigorous. Ideally, a company dedicated to pursuing long-term strategic success should have a culture of dissent, where rigorous debate is the norm. But most companies need to take more active steps to stimulate debate. The key ingre- dient is to depersonalize debate and make it socially acceptable to be a con- trarian. Here are some useful techniques: • Assigning a devil’s advocate. At a strategy discussion, assign someone the task of taking an opposing point of view. Make sure this contrarian’s contribution is more than just offering opinions. The focus should be 5 A. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 255. 6 I. Aminov, A. De Smet, G. Jost, and D. Mendelsohn, “Decision Making in the Age of Urgency,” McK- insey & Company, April 2019, www.mckinsey.com. 7 See, for example, A. Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2018). 578  Strategic Management: Mindsets and Behaviors on bringing out potential opposing scenarios of what could happen or highlighting missing information important to the debate. • Bringing a diverse group to the discussion. More than 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hear- ing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion.” More recent research has proven his point.8 Diversity means drawing on the opinions of people from different disciplines, roles, genders, and races in important discussions. Bring in more junior people with special expertise, create an environment where it is safe for them to speak up, and ask them for ideas. • Encouraging debate with secret ballots. Use a secret ballot at the beginning of the debate, not the end. Once a proposal has been presented and before it is debated, ask participants to vote on the idea in secret. The request could be for a yes-or-no vote on a project or for a ranking of investment priorities. When the results are revealed, assuming partici- pants discover at least one other person shares their views, the knowl- edge will likely make them more comfortable expressing their opinion. • Setting up a red-team/blue-team activity for large investments. Arrange two teams to prepare arguments for opposing outcomes. While undertaking the preparatory work and analysis for this approach is expensive, it can make a difference for particularly large decisions with high uncertainty. Confirmation Bias and Excessive Optimism Confirmation bias and overoptimism are two distinct biases. However, the same set of techniques applies to both, so we discuss them together. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for evidence that supports your hypothesis or to interpret ambiguous data in a way that achieves the same result. For business decisions, this often takes the form of “I have a hunch that investing in x would create value. Therefore, let’s look for some supporting facts that will back up our hunch.” The universal foundation of the scientific approach to addressing a hypothesis is the opposite: you should look for dis- confirming evidence. Overoptimism is the tendency to assume that everything will go right with a project, even though past projects tell us that such smooth outcomes are rare. A classic example is the construction of the famous Sydney Opera House, whose schedule and budget were both overly optimistic. The project was com- pleted ten years late and cost 14 times the original budget. 8 Ibid.