Great book, shows a plethora of tips and tricks on making the best possible decision you could make, would highly recommend, Can't wait for more books from this author.

Wow, this was an incredible book about biases and decision-making traps that often hinder our practice and progress.

This is a solid overview of cognitive biases, broken into short chunks for easy understanding. The second half of the book does a great job connecting the biases to one another and even showing how to use some of them together to cancel each other out. I really liked the "in thirty seconds" feature at the end of each chapter, summarizing everything that had been covered in a cheat sheet format. There are a lot of books on cognitive biases for business leaders, but this is one of the most accessible, practical, and fun to read. Thanks to the publisher for a NetGalley; opinions are my own.

We make so many decisions in a day that we subconsciously use biases. This unintentional bias is discussed in this book concerning business decisions, but there are times that we use biases subconsciously in every area of life. This was an interesting read.

YOU'RE ABOUT TO MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE by Olivier Sibony focuses on biases in business decisions and strives to address business leaders' growing acknowledgment of the need to address this issue. In part one of his text, Sibony argues that we are predictably irrational and outlines "nine decision traps into which our biases drive us." In the second part, he states that collaboration and process are essential to help organizations "produce choices that are less biased and more rational than our individual decisions would be." And, in the third section, Sibony explores a leader's role as a "design architect" and offers over three dozen practical techniques to consider applying. A key idea: give some thought to deciding how you will decide.

Sibony's writing is actually quite entertaining and even humorous at points. After all, he has so many failed strategic decisions from which to draw! There is also plenty of critical thinking to take into consideration – one pattern is the "storytelling trap" where executives may believe that are checking the facts, but are actually seeking to confirm (instead of disprove) a story presented to them. In other cases, psychology students will be interested in examples of terms like "halo effect," a "anchoring," or "risk perception." Each of the nine decision traps is explained in a chapter with case studies and then summarized in a "thirty second" one or two page overview.

YOU'RE ABOUT TO MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE is recommended by authors of business and psychology works such as Thinking, Fast and Slow, Grit, and Loonshots; consider pairing it with one of those (by Kahneman, Duckworth, and Bahcall, respectively) or with another leadership text -- maybe What's Your Problem? by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg.

An interesting book that looks how behavioral science can be applied to business with very strong case studies to illustrate. A great intro book for anyone in business that is interested in the subject. I did not think the second half of the book that discusses the application of behavioral science principles was as strong and the first half. Makes for an interesting read if you are interested in the subject matter.

I received a digital galley edition of this book from Net Galley in exchange for a fair review. Let me say, this is an excellent book. In fact, I would strongly argue that this book is better than Richard Rumelt's, "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy," that has been highly praised over the past decade as one of the few business strategy books that is worth reading. The author does a terrific job organizing common decision-making biases in an engaging, well-written way. He uses both his experience as a consultant and a well-read individual about behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, scholarly work in decision-making and business strategy. Rather than list the over 100 types of cognitive traps we fall into, he develops an ingenious taxonomy called the five families of biases that he breaks down into a star-like diagram with pattern-recognition biases at the top with action-oriented biases on the left hand point and inertia biases directly opposite and social biases and interest biases on the bottom with connecting lines between the 5 categories that form a star. This is probably the best classification I have seen in how to organize one's thinking about biases. He writes engagingly using both relatively known strategic business decisions that companies or political figures faced and some not so well known. At the end of every chapter is a brief review of the important points that have been explained, which is very well done.

There is also sage advice that it's also impossible to completely debias decision-makers, but "methods that change the environment of the decision-maker, instead of her way of reasoning," so that "the way to improve decisions in an organization is to improve the decision-making practices of the organization." In the latter part of the book he gives 40 tips on how organizations can do this. The tips are insightful but I felt that this was the weaker part of the book as each of the tips was only a few paragraphs long and didn't resonate as much as some of the more detailed anecdotes Siboni developed earlier in the book when he was able to more fully develop how unfortunate decisions were made by smart people by mixing analysis with narrative details within the corporate and political domains. The two most insightful stories to me involved Warren Buffett who was against an executive compensation package but still didn't vote no because he didn't want to "break the harmony of the group," which demonstrates how difficult it is to resist groupthink. The second anecdote, which is worth the price of the book in of itself, is how he demonstrates the perils of information cascades. For example, how an unanimous decision by a group of people may originate from just one impassioned individual. If a strong-willed proponent of an initiative goes first, perhaps the next person softens or eliminates his or her concerns such that by time everyone weighs in no one wants to be a naysayer and the group adopts a more extreme position because private information wasn't shared. In other words, what might have been a minority position becomes the majority one.

Yet despite the focus on how strategic decision making can go wrong, early in the book he contrasts the difference between intuitive decision-making and strategic decision making. He correctly, in my opinion, highlights how firefighters, nurses and others can make the correct intuitive judgement more often than not because the individuals working in this environment have "prolonged practice with clear feedback in a high-validity environment." These type of decisions are not strategic and therefore we can trust that most of the time we make correct decisions in our daily lives.

Sibony's book should be thought of as a primer for the "relatively rare" times when we face strategic decisions. I think this book could assist individual's personally and certainly leaders everywhere in how to make thoughtful decisions by setting up a sound decision-making architecture that leads to a better process in making decisions that impacts many lives. Credit for this wise, terrific book should also go to the translator, Kate Deimling, who does such a masterful job translating Siboni's French it's as if it was written primarily in English. This book is a must read and is highly recommended.