Chess grandmasters are expert decision makers

Slow and deliberate wins the decision-making game
HARVEY SCHACHTER
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Sep. 14 2014, 7:00 PM EDT

Chess grandmasters are expert decision makers. They survey the board, often seeing patterns familiar to them from countless games they have played or studied. Their next move will usually be immediately apparent. But they are careful not to pounce on it. They know a dangerous error in thinking is always possible. So they check their thinking before making their next move toward checkmate.

Ted Cadsby, the former executive vice-president of retail distribution at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Toronto-based director of several companies, believes that leaders, like grandmasters, have to be alert to the thinking errors they are vulnerable to as they grapple with complex issues.

“Managers have to operate like grandmaster chess players. They use – but don’t rely on – gut instinct. They step back and critically analyze the situation. That’s necessary because 25 per cent of the time, initial instinct would be wrong. Rushing to conclude is antithetical to good strategic decision making, because our first intuitions can lead us astray,” he said in an interview.

We get into trouble as every complex problem is unique. We may have developed expertise in solving routine problems, but each complex problem has its own special features. The two most likely and pernicious cognitive errors that can derail us flow from our addiction to certainty and our tendency to oversimplify everything.

We feel out of control when we are uncertain, so that pushes us toward embracing false certainty. “We are literally hardwired, physiologically and psychologically, to rush to conclude, because rushing to certainty is both survival-enhancing and a good way to preserve limited mental energy,” he said. But it can land us in trouble. To counter this tendency, he recommends:

Be skeptical of initial conclusions: Like a grandmaster, we need to slow down, and rethink the situation. That sounds simple, but in his book,Closing the Mind Gap, he notes it goes against the grain. Education, for example, is based on getting the one right answer quickly, within the time allotted on a test. If we can suspend judgment for a while, we’ll usually come to a conclusion as soon as we have considered a reasonable number of alternatives.

Full article here.