LFB Holdings
Strategic Advisory · lfbholdings.com

Decision distortion is amplifying every risk you're already managing.

Rate how strongly each statement describes your organization. Answer all 20 questions to see where noise, bias, accumulation, and incentive misalignment are most active — and receive a tailored report.

Noise

Unwanted variability in judgment — identical inputs producing different conclusions, with no principled reason.

  1. Before a major decision, we explicitly agree on which data we need — before anyone starts analyzing anything.

  2. Before we look at the data, we agree on what good looks like — so the data can't be interpreted to fit a conclusion we've already reached.

  3. After a major decision is made, people in the room would describe what was decided the same way.

  4. Across our organization, two people given identical information would reach the same conclusion — without needing to consult each other first.

  5. When we make a major decision, we document the reasoning behind it — including what we considered and rejected — so we can learn from it later rather than repeat it.

Bias

Directional distortion — the same kind of mistake, repeatedly, pointing the same way.

  1. When evidence pushes back on a direction we favor, we treat it as signal — not as a problem to be explained away.

  2. In our organization, the person who challenges the prevailing view in a meeting is respected for it — not quietly noted for it.

  3. Before we use a past success to justify a current decision, we explicitly examine whether the conditions that produced that success still exist.

  4. Before major decisions, we deliberately look for risks we wouldn't recognize from experience alone — because the most dangerous risks are the ones our past hasn't prepared us to see.

  5. In our organization, the sequence in which people share views during a major decision is actively managed to prevent early opinions from dominating the outcome.

Accumulation

Individually defensible decisions that become unsteerable in aggregate, with the subtractive option kept invisible.

  1. When something isn't working, we seriously consider eliminating it — not just fixing it or adding resources to it.

  2. In our strategic discussions, subtraction — stopping, exiting, or simplifying — gets the same consideration as addition.

  3. When performance falls short, we diagnose what's actually wrong before adding people, budget, or features — because more resources applied to the wrong problem make the problem worse.

  4. We regularly step back to assess what all of our decisions together have created — because individually defensible choices can combine into a position no single decision would have produced.

  5. When we've invested significantly in a direction, we evaluate whether to continue based on future potential — not on what we've already spent.

Incentive Misalignment

The environmental layer — metrics, compensation, reward structures — that governs how fast the other three forces compound.

  1. The metrics we report to outside evaluators and the metrics we actually run the business by are the same list.

  2. In our organization, people are rewarded for the quality of their decisions — not just for whether those decisions happened to work out.

  3. In our organization, the person who raises a difficult problem early is valued for it — not treated as the person who created the problem by naming it.

  4. The metrics we use to evaluate performance measure what actually matters — not what's convenient to track, which over time becomes what people optimize instead.

  5. In our organization, what's good for an individual team and what's good for the organization are pointed in the same direction — so teams aren't winning while the company is losing.

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