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Bad Decisions

Recently, I have been mulling over why competent people sometimes make a series of bad decisions that look like a set of bad gambling bets, each building on previous losses. Is this a time-bound thing that will pass with some break-through event occurring or is there a way to push the reset button on the process. Reading this HBR article on the topic was interesting. Decision fatigue seems to the likely culprit when one bad decision causes new variables to be introduced in an unstable system, requiring the decision-maker to make even better decisions than they were able to make before. 

Under such challenging circumstances and given their most recent loss, chances are the decision is bad one once again. Even if objectively "smart" decision, in the context it plays out badly. So now we have upto two bad decisions - the later worse than the former. The system is further de-stablized and yet more unknowns come into play and the cycle continues. It is possible to get to the point, when this decision-maker will simply not be able to climb out of their hole without divine intervention. The science of decision-making offers some insights into how we can fall into the trap of making the first wrong choice that can lead to a domino effect.

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