3.1.9.4. Harvard Business Review Article

“The Hidden Traps in Decision Making” — Harvard Business Review

This article examines how leaders make decisions in dynamic environments where information is incomplete, ambiguous, or changing rapidly — conditions identical to entrepreneurial reality. Instead of focusing solely on strategy or intelligence, the article demonstrates that decision quality is often determined by the unseen mental patterns influencing judgment. These unconscious tendencies — or “decision traps” — shape choices long before leaders consciously evaluate options.

A central theme of the article is that leaders rarely make poor decisions because they lack intelligence. They make them because of unexamined assumptions, cognitive shortcuts, and emotional reasoning disguised as logic. The article positions decision traps as predictable and preventable. When leaders learn to recognize these patterns, they can replace reflexive thinking with structured reasoning, improving clarity, confidence, and long-term outcomes.

As you read, pay special attention to how the article frames the relationship between bias and logic in real-world decisions:

• How traps such as anchoring, confirming evidence, sunk-cost commitment, and status-quo bias can feel rational in the moment — even as they distort clarity.
• Why decision quality improves when leaders make their reasoning explicit and visible, exposing hidden assumptions to examination instead of letting them operate in the background.
• How structured frameworks and mental models reduce reliance on willpower and instead build systematic protection against predictable errors in judgment.

The insights in this article are especially relevant to entrepreneurial leaders who make frequent, high-impact decisions under time pressure. It reinforces the core theme of this lesson: clear thinking is engineered, not accidental. Decision traps exist because the brain seeks efficiency over accuracy; mental models and structured reasoning exist to counterbalance that tendency.

Post-reading application

After reading the article, use it as a diagnostic lens on your own decision-making. Work through the following:

1. Identify a recent important decision.
   Choose a decision made in the last 30–60 days (strategy, hiring, investment, product, or partnership). Briefly describe what the decision was and the context in which it was made.
2. Map potential traps.
   Ask yourself: Where might anchoring, confirming evidence, sunk cost, or status-quo bias have influenced this decision? Note at least one possible trap and how it showed up in your thinking or discussions.
3. Redesign the reasoning.
   Using the mental models from this lesson (First Principles, Opportunity Cost, Second-Order Thinking, Inversion), outline how you would structure the same decision if you were making it again today. What would you do differently? What questions would you ask that you did not ask before?

The goal is not to judge past decisions, but to upgrade your process. Each time you recognize and neutralize a decision trap, you strengthen your capacity to lead under complexity — and move one step closer to a disciplined, repeatable standard of entrepreneurial judgment.