Ask a Decision Engineer - S4E08 - Don Moore on confidence and decision leadership

Jul 20 2022 38 mins 2

Confidence is a critical part of decision making and being an effective leader. Not enough confidence and you won't move a decision to the action or be able to cultivate the support needed to move it forward.

Too much confidence and you could make decisions that unnecessarily put you and others at risk. So how do you walk the line of having just the right amount of confidence?

Today, I speak with Don Moore: confidence expert, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor and author of the book, Perfectly Confident. We discuss the different types of overconfidence we should be aware of as well as ways that decision makers can better calibrate their confidence. He'll also share insights from his latest book Decision Leadership, which helps leaders think about how to empower people within their organizations to make better choices.

Topics Covered

03:02 What is at stake when confidence is not well calibrated?

04:52 Defining confidence

06:31 Confidence, reality, and the downsides of overconfidence

08:56 Calibrating confidence among startup founders

10:32 The 3 types of overconfidence

11:05 How to better calibrate your confidence

14:01 The importance of probabilistic thinking

15:52 Making decisions by calculating expected value

18:11 Beware of hindsight bias + Importance of documenting

19:44 What role should intuition play in decision making?

22:54 Some ways in which intuition is predictably biased

23:32 What decision makers should keep in mind - think beyond yourself

25:05 Leader as decision architect

28:03 Other ways leaders can positively influence the quality of decisions in their org

29:23 What to track

31:02 Choosing when to stop gathering information

32:49 Don't fall into the trap of focusing solely on what's easy to quantify

34:03 The downsides of underconfidence

Guest Bio

Don Moore is a professor of management of organizations at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He is the author of Perfectly Confident and a co-author of the books Judgement in Managerial Decision Making and Decision Leadership. His expertise and research interests include overconfidence, ethical choice, decision-making, and negotiation. He is only occasionally overconfident.