Cognitive Biases And Debiasing In Strategic Decision Making

Cognitive biases and their impact on decision making in general and specifically on strategic decision making have been recognized in psychological and management-related research over a long period. The vast research on this topic has unveiled more than 180 such potential flaws of decisions. The goal of this dissertation is to develop a better understanding of the role of cognitive biases in strategic decisions, how to detect and identify them and how to mitigate their influence in strategic decision practices. The articles of this dissertation provide four major contributions to the theoretical and practical knowledge on cognitive biases in strategic decision making: 1) This dissertation adds a mapping of more than 180 known cognitive biases based on the five phases of strategic decision-making processes and the three motivational backgrounds of cognitive biases. This mapping helps managers and other strategic decision makers to identify "what can go wrong" during their decision-making processes and allow them to recognize and anticipate these flaws, diagnose them, and take a next step towards a corrective intervention. 2) This dissertation shows for the first time the connection between the most prevalent cognitive biases, bias blind spots, and individual decision styles of managers. The resulting ranking of cognitive biases helps practitioners to focus on the "tip of the iceberg" and focus their corrective interventions on the most prevalent and impactful biases. The insights showed that rational and spontaneous decision makers report a smaller susceptibility for cognitive biases combined with bigger bias blind spots than other decision styles, and that intuitive decision makers have a higher awareness of their own bias susceptibility without showing bigger bias blind spots. 3) This dissertation integrates a more practice-oriented view of understanding (and communicating) debiasing techniques. This more practice-oriented understanding of debiasing techniques and the "know how" and where they might work supports the successful facilitation of decision-making practices in strategy. 4) And finally, this dissertation shows the relevance of the illusion of explanatory depth for strategic decisions. The results of these experiments demonstrate the need for a certain humility of managers concerning their knowledge of strategy-relevant digital technologies and that the technique of self-drawn, visual, explanations might help to overcome the individual overestimation of that knowledge.