A few years back, my team and I prepared for the launch of our new leadership product. We were excited. We even skipped a few key steps in our rush to market. We just knew we had something special. We messaged hundreds of thousands of people about the product, and when the launch was over, we\u2019d only made one sale. That\u2019s right\u2014ONE.<\/p>\n
Looking back, our mistakes are clear. We let our intuition and excitement get too far ahead of our logic and reasoning. We skipped over the critical thinking that\u2019s required for this type of business decision. It\u2019s easy to do.<\/p>\n
Bad decisions like this don\u2019t just happen. They come from bad thinking.<\/p>\n
To protect yourself from bad thinking that leads to business blunders, avoid the three decision-making traps below.<\/p>\n
The name of this trap comes from an old government joke. In Washington D.C. any projection that sounded too optimistic was said to be written by \u201cRosy Scenario.\u201d As you gather intel for your own decisions, you should be on the lookout for old Rosy.<\/p>\n
Most leaders have a strong vision. We know what we want to see in the future, and we have a tendency to fit every new piece of information into that vision. We get so wedded to the outcome that everything, even if it\u2019s contrary, somehow supports the decision we\u2019ve made. This is classic confirmation bias.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the thing we want to stay away from. Get nosy, not rosy. For instance, don\u2019t neglect the low-revenue projections simply because you believe in a product. You have to understand the difference between what you think and what you can prove.<\/p>\n
When something goes right, we look for underlying principles or ingredients that make up the recipe for success. This practice can bring healthy predictability to business decisions. It can also wreak havoc when we misidentify which ingredient is responsible for the success.<\/p>\n
When I was in the publishing world, there was a huge publishing success around a book called The Prayer of Jabez<\/em>. The book was pretty short. It fell into the gift book category. Universally, publishers agreed the key to success was in the small format of the book. Many invested in the mass production of more small-format books. In the end, almost all of them tanked.<\/p>\n It turns out that The Prayer of Jabez<\/em>\u2019s popularity was an anomaly. Publishers misidentified the ingredient that caused its success.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to mislabel ingredients. You have to do your research. You lose more from a bad decision than you gain from a good one.<\/p>\n\t\t