Confidence Isn’t Competence: Better Decision Systems With Melina Moleskis

Good decision making. It's not an innate ability which the way that our school curriculum curricula are designed. It's as if we're going to pick up decision making as we grow older, you know, mimicking adults, you know, learning along the way. Our mind will develop like that, but it's actually not, it's not like a baby learning to speak. It's more like, you know, anyone learning to speak a foreign language. So you need structure, you need feedback, you need to work on it. Can you achieve extraordinary results while making the world a better place? I'm Bruce Kempkin, and together we'll explore how. Welcome to Humanity at Scale Redefining Leadership podcast. Join me as I speak with visionary leaders and top experts to uncover the secrets of humanity centric leadership. Ready to rethink leadership? Let's dive in. Welcome back to Humanity at Scale. Leadership at its core is judgment. Day after day, leaders make calls with incomplete information, competing priorities, and more noise than clarity. The stakes can be high, the pressure is constant, and the people making those decisions are often smart, experienced and well intentioned. And yet, far too often capable teams realize in hindsight that they moved too quickly, didn't question enough, or felt more certain than the facts justified. So here's a key. Why do capable leaders keep repeating the same decision mistakes and only recognize them after the fact? I can't think of anyone better to explore that question than today's guest, Melina Molluskas. Melina is a behavioral decision scientist whose work focuses on how people and teams make decisions in demanding environments and how leaders can build the conditions for sound judgment. Judgment. Through her firm, Metadecisions, she works with organizations to strengthen group decision practices and design behavior change strategies that actually shift outcomes. She also serves as director of research at the Global association for Applied Behavioral Scientists and advises public and private institutions on applying behavioral science in practical, measurable ways. Blena, welcome to the show. Thank you, Bruce. It's great to be here. Now, before we talk about institutions and decision architecture, I want to start with you. What drew you towards the study of decision making in the first place? Was it intellectual curiosity, frustration with poor decisions, or something more personal? I guess it's been a journey. I started off as a mathematician, economist, so pretty focused on analysis and models. But as I entered the world, the business world, did an mba, worked here and there. I gathered more questions than answers. And so when the financial crisis hit, I saw an opportunity to say, okay, I'm going to take a gap in my career and go learn more about these things. I had Framed it at that point as, okay, decision making. I had no idea what it would entail. So I searched for decision analysis, decision science, and I did a PhD on that. That was back in 2013. And that's where you learn fundamentals about good decision making. And then at the same time, there was the behavioral side of it, which I felt, ha, that was what I was missing. You know, the missing link was like looking at it from the behavioral side. Interesting. As you moved to studying decision models, to working inside real institutions, what shifted in how you think about human judgment? You know, when you remove yourself from the day to day and you become more of an observer from for some time, as I did, I mean, necessarily through the research process, then you get to realize that there could be flaws anywhere, independent of hierarchy, years of experience, the traps. Everybody falls into this trap. Like you said, Bruce, I mean, it's not about being super capable or super intelligent. Sometimes there's a risk there because you don't check yourself often enough. But there could be traps anywhere, and it's really worth to catch these traps, no matter where they care. So when you, when you think back to your younger self who were starting on this journey, what would you say back then is the most surprising thing that you've learned along your journey so far? For me, and taking into account my background, the norms, and the culture where I grew up, it was very, you know, imprinted in our minds that, you know, superiors, people, you know, with years of experience, they are right. They, you know, they, I mean, it's their direction, it's their leadership, and it's, you know, you should follow them without, you know, so many questions, you know, trust a bit blindly. And that shifted for me completely in the sense that I have a newfound respect for leadership, in the sense that it shouldn't show confidence. It should show, like, confident humility, as we say. And it's that when I see that trait in leaders, then I am, you know, so this is like the ultimate to be humbly confident in how you lead people. So that's a good lead in to what I think is one of the really interesting themes in your research, right? The tension that experienced leaders feel confident, but that doesn't always lead to decision quality. In your workplace research and with client work, where do you most clearly see that gap between confidence and competence? Oh, that's a great question. Actually, we ran a study with the Global association of Applied Behavioral Scientists. We ran it very recently, and first we asked people, how confident do you feel in your decision making? And 91% of them, they felt that they had above average decision making skills. 91%. To be fair, that is completely statistically possible. First, because it was, you know, it's a small, it's a sample, it's a small sample. And second, it was made of, you know, middle to senior lead managers. So you know, they were right to, you know, think that they, they may have better decision making skills than others. But at the same time, because we asked them about their actual practices at work and we see the way their self perception that they admitted that even for important decisions, they could not follow structured decision processes. They rely a lot on memory rather than data. In certain instances, the meetings that they run or the meetings that are part of their team are quite ineffective. And biases like outcome bias, escalation of commitment, these are very often in their environment. So on the one hand they feel confident. On the other hand, you see all these traps that come either from themselves or the environment they find themselves in. And funnily enough, when we asked them why do they still feel confident, it was because of experience, years of experience. They've been doing this for years, which they tied to becoming really good at it just because it was a matter of repetition. But of course that's not the only prerequisite to become an expert in something. It's interesting. Why do you think that experience sometimes reinforces flawed thinking rather than sharpen the expertise? Right. One could say, well, if they draw on their experience, one of their experiences might be that they learn from data and they learn from other people. Right. Why aren't they drawing on that part of their experience to make better decisions? Yeah. So it's super viable. Right. The question is how much do you rely on it? And especially in fast environments where you need to speed is so important. But the thing with experience and intuitive expertise as we call it, to really have that fast judgment, besides doing this for years, you also need reliable feedback and you need an environment that has some recurring patterns. So then the question becomes for these leaders, does the environment give them these things? Is feedback, you know, does feedback arrive to them or is it obstructed, you know, by group dynamics, office politics, lack of measurement or, you know, of measuring the wrong things. And again, about, you know, the recurring patterns, is it that do situations, the same types of situations arise often enough so that the mind can start detecting these regularities and we don't always have them. I have a great example from basketball that I usually throw. I love watching basketball and you know, sometimes I get it to interrupt. I love the lead in. You have an example from basketball. You love to throw. The metaphor is perfect. Yeah, it's about, well, when you're caught in the game and you see a player, you know, making that incredible shot, and they are. They may be so far behind the line, they are under pressure from defense, and it still goes in. And so depending on which team you're in, you may say, oh, that was lucky, or that was good skill. But actually, elite athletes, basketball players, they are lucky in the sense that they get to practice. They get to have repeated exposure in environments that are pretty stable, steady. Right. Because of the physical properties, the court dimensions, the ball weighs the same, and they get immediate feedback. The ball either goes in or out. So once they practice enough, they reach that point where they develop this real expertise. And if you compare this to the environments in the business world, which are not like that, I think that makes the gap more obviously. So it's interesting, you talked about some biases and you've talked about some structure. So are leadership failures mostly cognitive or structural problems? That's a great question. And that's exactly what. How my work, what my work does, how I enter this thing. So if you think about all the challenges that might go on in the workplace, you'll get lost. It's chaos, right? Because they're all over the place. Some are cognitive, some are structural. So some are interactive. So it can be pretty much anything. So how do you go about improving any of these? The thing is that if we look at it as three layers, let's say. So first is the cognitive stuff and knowledge stuff, you know, being able to use some good practices. Then there's a layer where me as Melina, I have to talk to Bruce, I have to interact with. I have to get information from him, or I have to listen to what he's saying. So it's all these interactive skills that we also need to be good at. And then there's the context and the environment and what you call all this structural stuff, which if I'm in an environment where I'm not given clearly the time to run a decision tool, say a primordem or whatever, or the incentives. There are no incentives tied to doing any of this well, to do any part of the decision process well, the norms, how other people behave, how senior leaders behave. So if these are missing, and if anything is missing along these three layers, either cognitive interaction or context, then it's really hard, it's impossible to improve that part of decision making that you want to improve. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So there are three layers. And if you were to go in and let's say I'm a leader in my leadership team, I say, okay, we're really strong decision makers. What would you look for as real evidence that we are strong decision makers or that we're not? Oh, great. Great question. Sometimes I like to. One good test is if you take one of these strange, awkward tools that are evidence based, they're great, and you introduce them. So say that it's a new tool for the team. It needs to be a new tool. So say something like a primortem that we mentioned before. Okay, so it's a tool where basically it says that it's based on the science, that if you imagine something has already happened and it's in the past, you're more likely to find things that can go wrong with it. So it's sort of. So you ask yourself, you put yourself like one year ahead and goes, okay, I did this podcast with Bruce. It went horrible. Why? What were the risk factors? What went wrong? And then I'd be able to identify some things and prepare myself better. So you do this exercise and it sounds awkward, it sounds pessimistic. Instead of thinking optimistically about this, okay, I'm so excited to talk to Bruce. You put yourself in a position where, you know, you're thinking about failure and you're speaking it out glass. It's awkward on many levels. So if you take this exercise, introduce it into a team of who they say are great decision makers, then it's a good test. Because if they are great decision makers, it's not just about telling them, okay, let's sit one hour and do this, you know, do this exercise just to identify more risk factors. The person who would introduce it or the way it would be introduced was, you know, make sure that people are primed ahead of this. People understand that it's okay to voice out failures. So people are prepared. Leave enough time. Don't just leave like 10 minutes at the end of a meeting to do this. Leave it, you know, its own time. Run it properly, make sure people know the proper steps to do this. You prepare the ground and then once you run it and people. And it actually works, it will have worked because there's what we call psychological safety, right? And that's a great predeterminant of a place where there's high decision quality. So if you run, like, if you try to run a tool and for some some reason it gets stuck and it doesn't work, then these are the Some of the things that you can see, okay, maybe I'm not as great or there are areas for improvement within my team. Good. So it sounds like a good way for a leader to think about sort of evaluating their leadership judgment is to introduce a tool like that and see how it goes. But the problem with that is they're using the same structural and cognitive background to evaluate how well it's going. Right. So they have to make, it's sort of like meta decisions. Right. They have to make decisions about their decision making. So how can a leader sort of think through that? Obviously, you know, certainly at the end you can talk a little about what yo work does and I'm sure you can help them. But not everyone in the leaders listening can use your work. So how can they think about evaluating their own judgment? Great. So you're right, Bruce, that was like a quick test. But if you want to do it properly, if you're looking to see what needs improvement, well, you'll need to investigate your own context. And you never start blindly because, you know, from my experience, you know, the people who, the person who calls you in, they usually have a direction and some things that they want to improve. Right. And it's usually things that are in leadership or in management language like, you know, we are spending too, too much time on meetings and things, you know, decisions are made but no one follows through or we keep discussing the same thing again and again, all these things. So it could be disguised as that which is perfectly fine, but within that there's many things to unpackage. Right. So the reasons why such a great decision tool, group decision tool, as meetings is not running as effectively as it could. It could be many different reasons. And so in that case. You can observe as an independent person, best to have an outsider to observe and see how typically meetings are run within the company. You can run a survey, get feedback on the meeting, perhaps anonymous, the first stage, if you think there's people who want to speak up, you can have some chats with people if there is enough of psychological safety. But basically you need to get to the point of the problem. The other thing is that it's what I said in the beginning. There's usually a point where you want to start and it doesn't mean it never means it will solve everything. But you need to start from somewhere. And it's best to start from some of the things that you've already identified as a leader that you want to improve. And what happens is kind of magical. So as you improve something, then when you go on to the next decision challenge that you may be having, it might become even easier to improve it because improving even just a little part creates a lot of positive momentum within the team. Great. I want to shift to a term I think you used, decision friction, that describes what happens inside of capable teams. When you say decision friction, what does it mean and what does it look like when it's happening? It's a good question. So friction is when things get stuck, essentially. Right. So some of the things that we mentioned about meetings. So if you need to discuss the same thing that you discussed last time in the meeting and repeat things, that's some kind of friction. If, you know, decisions are made fast and people don't disagree, but then they talk outside, you know, in the corridors, in the hallways, there's some disagreement there, but it never reaches, you know, the decision maker. That's fiction also. So it means something is preventing them of expressing, you know, their super valuable different perspectives. So anything, any kind of thing that prevents the information coming in and the decision process moving smoothly, I mean, we can call as decision thinker. And it's not at all an academic term. It's just, you know, more every day. But yeah, great. And you oftentimes talk about traps that people get into to create friction, narrow framing, overconfidence, groupthink, stuff like that. Which ones are the most sort of prominent and drive friction for that senior team should really be on the lookout for group thing for sure, that you mentioned. It's a big one and it's kind of also a little bit sticky to improve in the sense that sometimes to overcome group thing, you need to change very much the way that you're discussing the way that you're running meetings. Perhaps, you know, prepare a tool in advance where you collect everyone's opinions with their names on, but you collect everyone's opinions without having them being influenced by anybody else. And then you go and discuss. But this is a big change from what teams usually do where, you know, they get together in a meeting and usually even the senior leader expresses their opinion and asks other people's opinions or even invites everyone to speak there and then with the risk of not being prepared, not wanting to express so strongly what they think in case other people disagree or there's lots of things that can go wrong. When we do it, we usually do it. So grouping is major. And I'll mention other two. So you. Because you also said narrow framing. Narrow framing is also what tends to essentially narrow framing is when you try to solve a problem, when you try to make a decision without having taken the time to, you know, really think about what you're deciding, what you're deciding, what you're not deciding, if you want to break it down by parts. And before you even figure that out, you start thinking of alternatives and options, which is what we do. Right. We're all intuitive problem solvers, we just love thinking about the solutions. So if we don't spend some time in the beginning to frame the problem properly, we're not in a position later on to figure out better solutions. And another major one I would pick, that we see very often is this focus on the outcome instead of the process. So many leadership teams basically evaluate decisions only by the results and after the results are shown. And if they're good, if the outcome is good, then the process is not examined. And if the outcome is bad, you know, blame is even personalized. But an important fundamental of how we make good decisions is that, you know, if you judge something by the outcome, then you become, you place yourself in a position where you, you are also open to all external effects. Right. And lack things that you could not have control. So it's, it makes much better sense when we try to improve something or work on something to focus on our process. Yeah, I oftentimes push that. I know it's the same thing for personal things. And in professional workplaces that process is repeatable. Outcomes aren't necessary necessarily. Go to the sports analogy. When people are evaluating a baseball player, they might evaluate the speed that their bat hits the ball, which is based on their process, not necessarily whether they get an out or a run. So they understand whether they have the long term tools to succeed. Because there's some randomness when you hit the ball, whether it's in a big park, a small park, it goes on the ground, goes in the air. So it's what they do that's more important and then what the outcome is in terms of being able to project long term success. And I think that's what you're saying about decision making as well. Exactly. So if you do something right in the long run, you'll get a better result more than if you just focus on the outcome and never improve on the process. Right. Because if you keep on improving the process, then you won't always get it right, you won't always have the outcome that you want, but you'll get better at it. My favorite example is when you know the coach, when they applaud even though the basket doesn't go in because they did the play Great. And that's so counterintuitive. But this is, I think, the definition of not being outcome biased. If you're enjoying this episode, make sure to follow or subscribe so you never miss a conversation. We've got plenty more great stories coming your way. Now. When we start redesigning decision process, and I think you've described it in a way that feels like decisions and input to decisions get spread more widely, it changes who can speak, who's heard, and who ultimately shapes the outcome. Does improving decision quality also redistribute power across an organization? I've never looked at it from this way. My impression is that not necessarily it improves input and it improves motivation. Because if, you know, as a junior associate, I feel that I'm given the responsibility to offer my tiny bit and you know, everyone is listening to that, it greatly improves motivation. But I think again, the decision making power and the ultimate decision, it remains, you know, as it was. Just that if you open all these channels and you improve the input that you get, we can imagine how much better the ultimate decision making will be. Now someone who's listening might be saying, and one of the things we talk about is the environment changing, things are more uncertain, things are happening faster and quicker. And we might be hearing that instead of relying on experience that a leader may have, which they can make a quick decision where instituting all of these processes and structural steps that seem to slow down the decision making, is that the right way to look at it? Or how do you think about decision making in a world of fast moving uncertainty? It's a good question. So on the one hand, the fundamentals don't change, right? There's a good way to go about deciding something. You know, there's an elaborate process. For me, the way I think of has eight steps and it's not linear. You know, it's like it's a long journey. But when you're in, there's no point going through that when you need to decide fast, right? In fast moving environments. But what you can still keep, it's key elements of that process that your team or your environment meets. If you can dedicate, for example, five minutes at the beginning of the meeting to frame the decision, five disciplined minutes to just frame the decision properly, then the alternatives you'll get will be better. Instead of an elaborate way to record the process, if you can have like short decision logs that people write and that they, you know, it outlines a little bit, you know, the situation, criteria outcome, then you get something that you can revisit and you know, improve your calibration. So if you do small parts of this big decision process, if you embed small parts of it, then you, it might feel like you're slowing things down, but essentially you're improving the process along the way. So you're just giving yourself a bit more time at the moments where you need it. When the moment, you know, we talk often about system one, system two, right, Bruce? So there's a lot of benefit to slow down even for a few minutes and then, and I'd say in fast moving environments, you can, instead of needing to decide every time, where do I slow down? The smart thing would be to, you know, embed, you know, as process or guidelines where people should slow down when they are in that moment and not having to decide, okay, I should, you know, focus for 5, 10 minutes now on framing the problem that I'm facing. So if you have this from a before, the more proactive you are, the less you slow down on the things you don't need to, but you slow the cognitive part down, which is what matters for later on. So, you know, whether it's, you know, system one, system two or three, conscious subconscious type of thinking. It's interesting because I think when you're moving fast, sometimes the subconscious kicks into all the worrying about threat and risk aversion. So do you expect that in fast moving organizations those types of biases filter into the ways that the types of decisions that are being made. It's sort of like the all of the faster you move, the more biases show up. Is that a fair way to think about it? So as time moves on and as the process is refined, and that's the key, right. If you keep calibrating and refining the process, then you gain more confidence in it and not the false kind of confidence or the right kind of confidence. So while yes, at first you can expect biases to be all over the place when you're moving fast, if you check on it and improve it, then you manage to mitigate a lot of this. We won't be able to eradicate all of them maybe in an age that things are more automated. But yeah, improving is through being able to register and come back and check on things. So it's sort of like you're building a decision muscle that operates sort of without much thought. You're making good decision processes not require a lot of cognitive activity over time because it's just sort of embedded in what you do. Yeah, that's the ideal, that's the goal. I mean, I don't know if you've heard of the alliance for Decision Education where they, you know, it's a nonprofit that they're trying to input decision education into k. Well, basically ages from 5 to 18. I don't know what's the proper term in the US but if we have the right way of dealing with different kinds of decisions, even from an early age, you get a huge advantage later on. And the same as you're saying in a workplace, once you start building that muscle, even when you're lower in the ranks. So if you're offered the opportunity to build on your decision making skills, then the company basically earns the advantage of having a funnel of good decision makers that are going higher and higher. Cool. So there are two parts to that I want to examine with questions. The first one is have you seen organizations that you've worked with or worked around that have focused on decision making and have radically changed sort of how they're doing and the way that they do their work? So the organizations that we're working with, we're taking steps, small steps, and yes, we are seeing improvements. The challenge, what happens is that it's hard to measure, which is it's hard to measure these improvements over time. So it's more like anecdotal feedback. And that's a disadvantage. And that's something that I'm also working at to get the commitment of know the team wants to go into it so that we're able to measure it. But yes, anecdotally at least, we're seeing a lot of, you know, we're seeing progress. The way we approach is like, as I said before, like one issue at a time. So it builds over time. It's never a case. I mean, we'll be working here for three months and we leave and it will be a huge change. It doesn't, I mean, it doesn't happen like that. Right. So it's behavioral change in different areas that takes place over time. And that's just how it is. That's a realistic way of having sustainable results. Well, and so the other thread of that that I want to go into is interesting that you describe the decision making and process as almost a skill that you talked about, can be embedded in kids and in junior associates. Right. I'm sitting back here thinking, my goodness, organizations would be way better if they had people who collectively had good decision making skills. Why is it that that hasn't become a core that we train early on? Right. It feels like it's way more important than many, many other things. We try and train people on. I have the same question. That's precisely my mission, if you like. So the thing is, the problem lies in the fact that good decision making, it's not an innate ability which the way that our school curriculum curricula are designed. It's as if we're going to pick up decision making as we grow older, mimicking adults learn along the way our mind will develop like that. But it's actually not, it's not like a baby learning to speak. It's more like anyone learning to speak a foreign language. So you need structure, you need feedback, you need to work on it. And that's why it's sort of missing from the early years education. But it's what you said, Bruce, like even later on we focus more on like technical skills. Let's learn mathematics, let's learn economics, you know, business skills. And even in business it's rare that you have a, you know, comprehensive view about at least the behavioral side of decision making and what it means to, to improve the decision of your team as well. And fortunately there are universities that are doing that, but it's not so widespread. Probably the other issue is that the trainings that we get within organizations are the types that, or at least that's what we saw from the survey from the Global association for Applied Behavioral Scientists. People find usually these trainings that are either theoretical, so they don't tie to the day to day stuff, so they disengage, they don't care so much about the theory, or they are boring, they're not taught in a way that is interactive and keeps them interested. And a lot of people even go out and find decision making classes themselves which if, however much you learn, then if you go and try to implement them in the team, it's not going to be as effective. Right. As if the whole team is trained together. So there's a lot to rethink about the way the trainings are offered as well. But it's so beneficial, right? Yeah. So if I go back to the earlier question about cognitive or structure, if we look at it from a little different angle, if I happen to be a person who has been trained and I have some of the skills, I've been skilled in good decision making, but I come into an organization where they do something else, am I going to be able to use those skills or am I going to be rejected like an organism that doesn't fit? Yeah, that's huge question. Right. So I'd say it depends on the gap between the skills that you have like the good decision making skills and where the organization or that team is at the moment and if it's far away, it's more likely to be rejected. And over time even the person who's a great decision maker, you know, might give in, deteriorate. So it's always, I don't see any other way apart from trying to, you know, bringing those different layers together. So even if they're not incentives from the organization, like, you know, financial incentives, there are other kinds that can help good decision, you know, practices flourish. Good. So I want to look a little bit now at the future. Everything we've discussed sort of assumes humans are driving the decision process, yet increasing the options, framing and analysis are being shaped, sometimes pre structured by algorithms and AI systems. So as AI increasingly shapes analysis and recommendations, where do you see the greatest risk to judgment and decision making? Oh yeah, it's a great question. I think that's what is in everyone's minds, right? I mean, how the world is evolving with AI? Well, essentially perhaps, I mean there was a recent study that you go out from like system one and system two and you move to have also a system three, right. So the work that was created by AI, AI. And from my perspective, there's so much speed that we can gate through automating stuff, but we also need to recognize from the judgment perspective, as you said, that AI won't be able to do the trade off between our different values or completely set the criteria that we have and the values that we want to pursue with this decision, the nuances behind it. You know, some, you know, we may even it can help us brainstorm some solutions, but like looking at those, we may even be able to find higher order solutions ourselves. Creativity, the solutions that it will give you will probably be based on like what it's been fed. So there's, and there's possibly other things that have to do like with the human side, right. How it will be, you know, these decisions will be perceived by others, the group dynamics, et cetera. So all these things, it's impossible, I think for an AI to do at least now. Plus what is, I think for me as well, I always remember the example that even, you know, food delivery. So sometimes even if you're able to just, you know, use your phone to order food, sometimes maybe it's even better to just, you know, walk five minutes to the restaurant and take it from there because of the social interaction that you're going to gain, right? You're going to see a human being, et cetera. So this, you know, this example is always. It follows me around whenever I think about AI because at the end of the day, my goal is not to make my chatgpt better. My goal is to train my mind. And if I continuously rely on it, then my value as a person, as an employee, as a consultant will deteriorate over time. I don't want to give in to just outsource everything. First, it cannot, and second, it takes away my learning. So interesting. So that talks about the relationship between sort of what the human does and what AI might do. I also, I'm just intrigued by the discussion we had about decision making as a core skill to be. Towards the beginning, one of the things that I believe about AI is fundamental to what I've talked about and I write about is that we have choices to be made about how technology, any type of technology, AI evolves. Right. A part of me wants to sort of, sort of jump on what you said and say, well, we might not have done yet a good enough job of skilling up our kids to make good decisions, but boy, we ought to use what we know about good decision making and train AI on how to make good decisions. Right. Because I hear a lot of the practices you talk about feel to me like they could be trained into an AI so that we can at least ensure that AI is making better decisions. What are your thoughts about that? I think AI is a great tool to bring in the organization to help along with, you know, the cognitive, to prompt you, prompt you to do like on the spot, pre mortem or like, you know, inverted thinking or any, any kind of like these, these exercises that help you think of a problem or like even, you know, create some space for you, you know, before you, you take action to rethink. So AI is great. AI can be a good facilitator. It can, it can be programmed to follow the steps. Great. At the same time it will. And the role that I'm describing here, it's not a decision maker. Right. It's like an assistant. It helps you, it prompts you, it reminds you to think and how to do things. And that's a great use for AI. And I'm very happy to say, I mean, there's already modules that are coming out that can be licensed for these kind of purposes. And it's great. But even you can, we can all program like a simple thinking, sparring partner ourselves. So in that sense, yes. But there's the subtleties of the judgment and the values that we have and the relationship we built with others. The way we include others in the conversation and we make sure that it's, yes, we make good decisions, but others also are encouraged to contribute. We explain our thinking, and by doing that, maybe we help others be privy to how we're thinking and improve their own judgment or correct us. So all these things, I think are still very human behaviors, human skills. Great. And that's a great place for us to transition into the closing questions. The question is a question I ask all my guests. The first one is, what's one leadership skill that you think will become even more important in the future? Human centricity. Oh, like, love that. It's huge, right? But yeah, human centrisity. And that. That is great for my. My theme and leads into my next second question. The second question I ask everyone, which is, if you could wave a magic wand and instantly make organizations more humanity centric, what would you change? First, I would say it's. It's. It's like if you have a pyramid, it's like very much at the, you know, at the base of the pyramid. Inclusivity. Inclusion. I'm not sure of the right word in English. Inclusivity. Participation. Yeah. Good. And what's one final piece of advice you'd like to leave with our listeners? I think, reflecting on what we talked about today, I think it's important to view decision making as both the skills and the knowledge that someone might have, as well as the surrounding environment that allows them to use those skills. Cool. And finally, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are wondering where they can find out more about what you write and what you think and get access to all of that. Where should they go to get deeper into the ideas you champion? There's LinkedIn. I'm right there on LinkedIn. And there's also our webpage, metadash decisions.com. i mean, I write not as often as you, Bruce, but I write every now and then. I newsletter and I try to get some ideas out there, and we'll make sure to include those in the show notes. So, Melina, this has been awesome. Thanks for joining me on the show. Thank you so much for inviting me. And thank you for all your good work, Bruce. Oh, thanks. Well, I hope you found this conversation with Melina as interesting as I did. Now let's move into the after show, where I'll reflect on some key takeaways from today's discussion. Welcome to the after show. What I loved about this episode with Malina Molaskis is that it wasn't generic. Be a better decision maker advice. It was a grounded look at why capable teams still stumble and what actually changes when you treat judgment as something you can intentionally build. Five takeaways really stayed with me. The first is that confidence is not proof of competence. Molina shared that in a recent study, 91% of respondents rated their decision making skills as a result above average. That's statistically possible, especially with mid to senior leaders. But when they looked at actual behavior, many admitted they skipped. Structured processes for important decisions, rely heavily on memory instead of data, and sit in meetings they themselves describe as ineffective. That gap between how good we think we are and how disciplined our practices actually are is where risks are live. Second takeaway is that experience only becomes expertise in the right conditions. Her basketball analogy was perfect. Elite players get repetition in stable environments. With immediate feedback, the court doesn't change. The ball weighs the same. The ball either goes in or it doesn't. In business, feedback is delayed, distorted, and politicized. Patterns aren't stable, so years of repetition can quietly become years of reinforcing flawed instincts. Third, decision failure isn't one thing, it's layered. She described three cognitive skills and tools, interactive dynamics and structural context. You can train people on biases all day long, but if meetings shut down, dissent incentives reward speed over rigor or leaders anchor the room by speaking first, the structure overwhelms the skill. That framing shifts the conversation from who made the mistake to what conditions produced it. Fourth, decision quality shows up at how teams handle discomfort. Her example was a pre morte. Imagine a year from now that the decision failed and asking what went wrong? It feels awkward and pessimistic, which is exactly why it's revealing. If a team can prepare for it, make space for it, and speak honestly, you're seeing psychological safety and process discipline. If it collapses or gets rushed, that tells you something too. My final takeaway is that decision making is the foundational skill we neglect. Melina made a simple point that stayed with me. Good decision making doesn't just improve with time or title. It develops through structure and feedback. Yet we really build it deliberately. Not in schools, not in most organizations. We prioritize knowledge and skills training, but not the discipline of framing problems, weighing trade offs, and learning from outcomes. And it's just as important for a second grader as it is for a senior executive. I'll leave you with two questions to sit on after this episode. First, what are you doing intentionally to improve how you and your team make decisions? And maybe more importantly, what are we collectively doing to make sure our kids are developing that skill as well. That's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And remember, you are the flame that can spark humanity at scale. One decision, one conversation, one moment at a time. Thanks for tuning in to humanity at Scale. Redefining Leadership Podcast Remember, true leadership isn't only about achieving short term results. It's about creating a lasting, positive impact on all of the people you touch. Join me next time as we uncover more insights and strategies for leaders Humanity centric leadership. Until then, I'm Bruce Temkin encouraging you to lead with purpose and empathy and to be the spark that elevates humanity at scale.