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Enhancing the Strategic Decision-Making Process: Unintended Consequences as a Source of Learning

ABSTRACT A widespread practice in many organizations is to highlight successful stories, usually known as the best practices in business management, with the intention to help managers to make effective decisions based on the publicized determinants of highly successful organizations. Considering that managers are continuously challenged to make decisions in an increasingly complex, unstable, and unpredictable environment, which was made more evident by the 2008 economic crisis, we argue that beyond such best practices, unintended consequences have the potential to foster learning as well. In looking for evidence for this argument, we searched the literature on decision-making processes and unintended consequences thereof and identified individual psychological elements that can influence corollary learnings: cognitive processes, attentional phenomenon, and defensive attitudes. From these theoretical bases, we drew on an empirical study with five strategic decision makers at the Brazilian subsidiary of one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. We expect that by understanding individual psychological elements that usually block the opportunities for learning from unintended consequences decision makers can avoid them and use learning to improve the decision-making process.