NCSB Journal Spring 2026

The Fine Art of Making Better Decisions

B Y R . M I C H A E L W E L L S

S tudies tell us our process for making important business decisions could be improved, and sometimes in significant ways. Many wrong choices could become r g t A healthy exchange in which an opposite view is fully and artfully presented to the pre sumptive choice will enhance your decision making skills despite what your ego and gut feeling instincts may tell you. Confirmation bias runs rampant in lots of ways, but it often travels in your driver’s blind spot on the jour ney to better reasoned decisions. Here is an example. A non-profit organization of which I was a part needed to fill a routine skilled position to help with a certain aspect of our body of work. The skills needed were clear. A poten tial candidate was identified who had some past but out-of-date experience that fit. However, she had uncalibrated advantages, too: she had a personal friendship with one

Andrii Yalanskyi/istockphoto.com

better choices if we did a more disciplined job of handicapping true facts, and if we learned that largely irrelevant facts have no value.

of the deciders. And she also made a nice appearance, often an unspoken factor in the room. In a short amount of time the key job skills needed were minimized, and the process of figuring out how to fit the prover bial square peg in the round hole began. The original objective was quickly discarded, and our organization was about to spend a much higher amount of money for a job skill— management—which we already had in place. When another member of the manage ment team not involved in the individual’s interview probed the significant weaknesses in the initial analysis, it became clear that the entire process had turned down a dead-end

road because the heads of the interviewers were turned by largely irrelevant factors to the decision. Another example. A law firm I know had a relatively new partner who was good friends with an office manager from his for mer firm, and that new partner wanted his new firm to hire that office manager. The candidate brought no special skills to the job, but because he was the only candidate, and not coincidentally the new partner’s golfing buddy, most of the other partners went along and he was hired. Some partners noted appropriately that being the only candidate available after a limited search was not exact ly a ringing endorsement of necessary job skills to task. The new manager did the job

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THE NORTH CAROLINA STATE BAR JOURNAL