Important decisions

This post from Bob Sutton, co-author of

Knowing-doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action has written a post about Lovaglia’s Law.

To quote:
"Lovaglia’s Law: The more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it."

I was intrigued by this idea:
“…the more is at stake, the more that people will be motivated to push for solutions that increase their power and decrease other’s power – and not motivated to take steps that help other people or other groups, let alone that help the system as a whole.”

This observation certainly comes into play in projects where there is significant or even minor change happening in an organisation. Often projects have been stalled or seriously disrupted for apparently illogical reasons. Perhaps Lovaglia’s Law helps to explain what is really going on.

A suggested solution:
“A partial, and paradoxical, solution is implied by Karl Weick’s work on small wins... : If important decisions provoke so much greed, distress, and irrationality, it might be best to try to reframe big decisions as small ones –- to fool yourself and others into believing that what seems big is really small!”