Why your worst decision probably came from your best analysis

One of the first things I ask when working with new clients is how they make decisions. The most common problem I encounter isn’t a lack of intelligence or commitment; it’s paralysis around decision-making.

I've seen teams defer to whoever can dominate the meeting, groups default to the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO), and others avoid decisions entirely, oscillating between “analysis paralysis” and reactive choices – never quite trusting either their heads or their guts.

I think this happens because we've inherited a false binary that pits rational analysis against embodied intuition: the head against the heart. When these appear to be in opposition, we get stuck choosing sides.

But what if these approaches aren't opponents but in conversation with one another? What if effective decision-making emerges from a dialogue between systems and gut feelings, rather than trying to choose one over the other?

The rational approach

Rationality offers us invaluable tools. I remember going through The Decision Book, which contains fifty models for strategic thinking, and feeling that I'd found some kind of oracle. From now on, I'd be able to improve myself, understand others better, and improve my work through systematic models and decision frameworks.

And the rational approach does work. There are times when you need frameworks to create consistency, reduce cognitive bias, and enable meaningful comparison across alternatives. Frameworks help us make implicit criteria explicit and be systematic rather than haphazard in our approach.

Yet the rational tradition has limits. Research around decision fatigue shows that we actually have finite cognitive resources for decision-making. It's like a muscle that gets tired through use: after prolonged decision-making, we make worse choices, become more impulsive, and sometimes either avoid decisions altogether or default to whatever seems easiest.

Analysis paralysis sets in when we attempt to evaluate too much information. Psychologists have found that “maximisers” – people who try to optimise every decision through exhaustive analysis – tend not to excel in life satisfaction but in depression, perfectionism, regret, and self-blame.

I don't know about you, but while I'm fond of a spreadsheet, especially when comparing multiple options, it can go (much) too far. A purely rational approach assumes we are disembodied brains simply processing information. It neglects something fundamental: we are embodied, and our bodies know things our conscious minds do not.

The embodied approach

Interoception is our ability as humans to perceive internal bodily signals like heartbeat, breathing, and gut sensations. These play a significant role in decision-making, with research showing that higher interoceptive awareness correlates with better performance on complex tasks. Activity in the brain regions that process bodily signals links directly to decision-making success in people with accurate body awareness.

This research means that we have a scientific grounding to what we experience as “gut feelings.” It turns out that they aren’t random hunches, after all, but the brain’s rapid integration of complex bodily information, past experiences, and emotional cues into a coherent whole.

Your body is constantly processing information from your environment and from memory, generating feelings about options before your conscious mind has finished its analysis. It's one of the reasons we flinch from a hot stove before we consciously process that it's hot. So learning to listen to these signals is a form of intelligence, not irrationality.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, whose work influenced Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, defines gut feelings as judgments that appear quickly in consciousness. We are not fully aware of the underlying reasons for these judgements, but they are strong enough to act upon, which is why we might describe something as giving us “the ick” without being entirely sure why.

This isn't some kind of mystical impulse, however, but rather neurologically based behaviours that we have evolved as humans to help us survive. Less information is sometimes better for decisions. Rather than processing every available data point, our gut focuses on cues that matter most in the moment.

Gigerenzer's work stands in opposition to the rational tradition where more data yields better choices. Instead, gut feelings work by considering only the most useful bits of information rather than attempting to evaluate all possible factors. By providing selective attention, we are able to make fast and effective decisions in complex, uncertain environments.

Combining the two

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman described our thinking through two systems:

• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. It’s fast, intuitive, emotional, and associative.
• System 2 is slower, more deliberative, analytical, and effortful. It's the conscious reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do.

We tend to identify with System 2, seeing ourselves as rational actors making conscious choices. But Kahneman argues that it's actually System 1 in charge, generating impressions and feelings that become the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.

Both systems are needed. System 1 is generally very good at modelling familiar situations and making short-term predictions. It has systematic errors and biases. System 2 can catch these errors, but only if we engage it deliberately – and we often do not.

The collective approach

As I've discussed before, consent-based decision-making offers a practical alternative to both autocracy and endless consensus-seeking. The standard is “good enough for now, safe enough to try” rather than insisting that everyone must enthusiastically agree. It's much more realistic.

Consent is different from consensus in a subtle but powerful way:

• Consensus requires everyone to say “yes.”
• Consent requires that nobody says “no.” (or more precisely, that nobody has a significant objection they cannot withdraw)

The consent approach opens up a space between disagreement and rejection. You don’t have to love a proposal; you just need to lack a principled objection to trying it.

If you're interested, I'd suggest you attend a workshop such as those run by the Alpacka Collective. Essentially, the process typically follows these steps:

1. Present the proposal clearly
2. Clarifying questions round where everyone gets to ask for understanding without debating
3. Brief response round featuring reactions without lengthy discussion
4. Consent round where a check is made for objections using the question “do you have any significant objections?” (rather than “do you agree?”)
5. Address objections by improving the proposal
6. Repeat until no significant objections remain

I know that it works in practice, because we've used it for years at this point in our cooperative as well as in cooperative networks of which we are part. We've also brought it into longer-term client work.

Consent-based decision-making covers both embodied (System 1) and rational (System 2) approaches. The attention to each person's sense of whether they consent satisfied the former, while the systematic rounds and clear process satisfy the latter. It's a recognition that we need both approaches, and that sometimes people cannot articulate rationally how they feel.

Although the approach might feel “slow” at first, decisions made through consent respect the limits of those who must live with the consequences. It's a faster approach than getting to real consensus and it's much more inclusive than autocratic decision-making.

Final words: head, heart, and we

Decision-making is both an art and a science; rational and embodied, and both individual and collective. Wisdom begins with integrating both rather than choosing sides.

In my experience, when teams get stuck, it’s usually not because they lack frameworks or ignore their intuition. It’s because, unconsciously, they've chosen one tradition and excluded the other. Or, even worse, they've defaulted to the highest paid person's opinion (HiPPO) without engaging either tradition properly.

Theodore Roosevelt offered wisdom that transcends both traditions:

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

The worst thing, doing nothing, involves paralysis. It's an attempt to wait for a certainty that will never arrive, often “solved” by merely deferring to whoever speaks loudest. We live in an uncertain world, so our System 1 faculties, evolved over millennia, matter far more than most organisational charts suggest.

The right thing to do integrates head and gut, structure and listening, individual insight and collective wisdom. Combining rational and embodied approaches is a creative tension to inhabit, a “both-and” rather than an “either-or.” When we stop trying to choose between our head and our gut, we are less likely to make those “best analysis, worst outcome” decisions, and more likely to bring our full intelligence to work.