By the time executives get to high levels, they are good at making others feel confident in their judgment, even if there's no strong basis for the judgment.

The most valuable insight I have made about how people make decisions is that when they become skilled they don't have to make decisions - choices between options. Instead, they can draw on experience and the patterns they have acquired to recognize what to do, ignoring other options. This is the basis of the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model my colleagues and I described thirty years ago.

Most corporate decisions aren't going to meet the test of high validity. But they're going to be way above the low-validity situations that we worry about.

There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.

If a situation is very, very turbulent, it has low validity, and there's no basis for intuition.

My research suggests that when people get rebuffed they become frustrated and angry, but they would do better to become curious about the reason for the rejection. I also found that people assume that others are like them, operating under the same knowledge, beliefs, constraints and priorities. This mirror assumption makes it easier to speculate about why others act in the way they do, but sometimes the mirror assumption is wrong.

People sometimes are so confident in their flawed beliefs that they get stuck - fixated - and as a result are blinded to insights that are right in front of them.