How the decision was made matters more than how well it was analysed

Most organizations respond to a difficult decision by improving the analysis. More data, another model, a second opinion. It is the intuitive move, and the evidence suggests it is the smaller lever.

The study

Lovallo and Sibony examined 1,048 major business decisions over five years, recording both the analytical rigour applied and the process used to reach the decision. Process explained considerably more variance in the outcome than analysis did.

Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2010). The case for behavioral strategy. McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.

It is practitioner research rather than a controlled experiment, and worth citing as what it is. But the direction is consistent with decades of laboratory findings on how groups handle information, and it is measured on real decisions with real consequences.

Why this is hard to act on

Analysis is legible. You can commission it, review it, and point at it afterwards. Process is invisible while it is working and only obvious when it fails, which makes it easy to underfund and hard to defend in a budget conversation.

Nobody has ever been criticised for buying more analysis. That is precisely why it is over-bought.

What a better process actually looks like

It is not longer meetings. In practice it means deciding what is being decided before anyone argues about the answer, surfacing the information that is not being volunteered, making competing assumptions explicit rather than letting them stay implicit, and recording the basis so the decision can be defended later without relying on anyone's memory of the room.

None of that requires more data. All of it requires structure.