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Advances in the field of behavioral economics ought to make us at least aware of what goes into making good decisions, if not make us better decision-makers. The McKinsey Quarterly is featuring an interview with two people who are putting some important lessons about decision-making out into the world: McKinsey's own Olivier Sibony , and Chip Heath --co-author, with his brother Dan, of Made to Stick and Switch . The interview centers on the Heaths' latest book, Decisive , and Sibony's research on effective decision making among global business leaders. Here is an excerpt: The Quarterly: Is the right approach to suggest a couple of simple things senior executives can do or to recommend that they take a step back and look at a whole checklist or framework to create a healthier process? Chip Heath: I’m a fan of frameworks, but you don’t have to be 100 percent there to improve dramatically. One legitimate criticism of the decision-making field is that we have this overwhelming zoo of biases. In our most recent book, Decisive, we therefore came up with 4 intervention points in the decision process. Others propose 40 intervention points. Nobody will be successful intervening at 40 decision points. Olivier Sibony: We too have looked at this zoo of biases and tried to sort out what really matters to executives. When people ask me what will make a difference as they build decision processes, I emphasize three things. First, recognize that very few decisions are one of a kind. You are not the first person to decide on an acquisition. Lots of M&A happened before, and you can learn many things from that experience. Second, recognize uncertainty—have alternatives, prepare to be wrong, and have a range of outcomes where the worst case is real and not “best case minus 5 percent,” which is very common. Creating a setting where it’s OK to admit uncertainty is very difficult. But if you achieve that, you can make headway. Third, create a debate where people speak up. It’s the most obvious but also the most difficult. If you’re the decision maker, when you get to the debate you’ve already got an idea of where you want it to lead. And if you’re an experienced executive, you’ve already influenced your people, consciously or unconsciously. A good intervention point, for instance, is to ask subordinates if anyone disagreed with them about a recommendation they bring to you. If everybody agreed, that’s a sign that there may have been “groupthink.”3 Chip Heath: All of the things you’ve highlighted are things we grappled with in designing the WRAP process we propose in our book (see sidebar, “Four principles for making better decisions”). A Wider set of options means you’re going to have more debate. By Reality-testing assumptions, you look at the reference class of events. If you make a decision about restaurants, you read reviews because that’s your reference class. Yet if you’re making a merger decision, you won’t look at the reference class of companies in similar situations. Why do this research for a $200 dinner but not a $200 million acquisition? Then there is the process of actually making a decision. It’s now slightly more complicated because instead of one option you’ve got two, and you’ve done some due diligence on both. When you find yourself agonizing about a choice, it’s important to step back and Attain some distance. Finally, you should be Preparing to be wrong at the end of the process—that’s about hard-to-acknowledge uncertainty. Read the full interview here .

It has been more than a decade since Richard Florida got our attention with his book, The Rise of the Creative Class . Even with the tumult of the last several years, Florida has not changed his position. He continues to believe that workplaces that tap into, and encourage, the creativity in workers will reap benefits in today's global economy. In this Big Think interview, Florida discusses the continuing rise of the creative class:

For those executives who have not convinced themselves they have all the answers, strong leadership depends in part on utilizing the collective wisdom of all members of an organization. At Fast Company , Fort Hill President Michael Papay outlines some best practices for using crowdsourcing techniques to tackle organizational challenges. One tip is to " Create a Great Experience ": The quickest way to get to some fast answers is to make the experience a good one, perhaps even delightful. Time compresses when we’re engaged. The trouble is: Most survey methods are too cumbersome and too dreaded because the experience is dry and usually awful. What if you engaged people--perhaps even delighted them--in the process of asking them questions? This is less about driving people to do a survey, and more about the experience pulling them into a process where they see where others are, contribute, and shape direction. Facebook and other social media took off when the experience was simple and when people knew they’d learn something as they participated. And, in the process, those experiences created “stickiness”--the idea that people are drawn to return for more. In fact, the dominant social media sites--Facebook and Twitter--each ask simple questions to prompt posts and tweets: What’s going on and what are you doing? How about something that’s a good experience for the users--a crowdsourcing tool that engages the crowd and people see they can shape the opinion of a company? The process is transparent--people can see what others are doing. You get more engagement and you compress the time. Read Crowdsourcing Your Way to More Effective Leadership here .

Don Tapscott says that it is time for organizations to shift their internal communication platforms. Out with email. In with effective use of social media. But don't make the mistake that he is making a simple point about just about how workers send messages. This is about decision making and knowledge management, Tapscott says. In this interview at the McKinsey Quarterly , Tapscott says that knowledge management "has failed." And the only way to fix the problem is to take knowledge out of a "container" and focus on "content collaboration":

Bob Kulhan has taken his background in improvisation and built a business--and a teaching position at Duke's Fuqua School of Business--out of it. Kulhan applies the skills learned from improv to managerial decisions. He says the key to innovating your way out of a problem is to apply the central two words of improve work: "yes, and." He explains the value of this approach in a Big Think video:

New Year's Resolution for top executives: kill your company. Don't really kill it, of course. Rather, go through the first exercise in Lisa Bodell 's book Kill the Company: End the Status Quo . Bodell--founder and CEO of FutureThink --advises top managers fully engage with an exercise to determine their organizations' most dangerous vulnerabilities. If you figure out your weaknesses before your opponents do, you may be able to change them before they cause you real lasting harm. Bodell spoke about the need for this level of intense self reflection with Knowledge@Wharton 's Shannon Berning :

The New York Times Corner Office column is a must read for those of us trying to keep tabs on the business world and leadership. Adam Bryant, the NYT editor behind the column, has now compiled key lessons from the hundreds of interviews he has done with CEOs for the column and put them into a new book. He recently discussed The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed with Knowledge@Wharton 's Shannon Berning . In the interview, Bryant says there are five traits that are common among people who have been able to reach the corner office: passion and curiosity , battle-hardened confidence , t eam smarts , simple mindset , and fearlessness .

The disruptive force that is social media has only just begun to show its influence on global business, according to McKinsey analysts Jacques Bughin , Michael Chui , and James Manyika . In a new article for the McKinsey Quarterly , the authors say that companies have not really begun to see the full potential of the "value creation" social tools provide: Since “social” features can be added to almost any digital application that involves interactions among people, the range of uses is immense and measurement correspondingly challenging. Thus, we cast a wide net. We studied several hundred cases of organizations using social technologies around the globe. In addition, we examined the patterns of knowledge work within organizations and drew insights from data covering several years of surveys involving thousands of global executives on the ways their companies use social technologies. Our analysis of successful uses served as a basis for modeling potential improvements across the value chain. Of late, some bearish sentiments surround social technologies after disappointments for several companies in the capital markets. It’s worth noting, however, that today only 5 percent of communications occur on social networks. Moreover, almost all digital human interactions can ultimately become “social,” and jobs involving physical labor and the processing of transactions are giving way, across the globe, to work requiring complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and the analysis of information. As a result, we believe social technologies are destined to play a much larger role not only in individual interactions but also in how companies are organized and managed. We estimate that using social technologies to improve collaboration and communication within and across companies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent (Exhibit 1--below). These dramatic gains would occur thanks to shifts in the way these workers communicate—from using channels designed for one-to-one communication, such as e-mail and phone calls, to social channels, which allow “many-to-many” communication. Specifically, our research indicates that interaction workers typically spend 28 percent of each day (13 hours a week) reading, writing, and responding to e-mails. A huge amount of valuable company knowledge is locked up in them. As companies adopt social platforms, communication becomes a new form of content, and more enterprise information can become readily accessible and easily searchable rather than sequestered as inbox “dark matter.” Employees will be able to find knowledge in the organization more readily and to identify experts on various topics, given the expertise implied by their patterns of social communication. We estimate that 25 to 30 percent of total e-mail time could be repurposed if the default channel for communication were shifted to social platforms. Read Capturing business value with social technologies here .