Many of an organization’s worst decisions aren’t made by incompetent people. They are made by smart, confident people who are nonexperts in the domain where they have decision-making authority.
Nonexperts with decision rights tend to make bad choices and decisions, especially when selecting talent, consultants, vendors, and other experts to utilize and rely upon.
They don’t decide wrongly because they ignore important criteria but because they give too much weight tosuperficial attributes, such as brand, social proof, and likeability, and too little weight to the performance criteria most important to true experts.
Research reveals that nonexperts also prioritize immediate outcomes, such as short-term comfort and speed of implementation, over long-term effectiveness, established track record, and strategic fit.
Whatever is most popular or conventional holds greater sway for them than does evidence of objective performance.
Instead of asking, “Is this program or vendor good?” they ask, “Does this feel right to me?” They know that feeling right is much easier to defend in a meeting than being right.
This is one reason so many low-quality programs, experts, and experiences are brought into organizations and become deeply entrenched over years.
When nonexperts make the call, the wrong criteria are used to discern quality from mediocrity.
For instance, when marketing experts make artistic decisions, or when human resources experts decide between artificial intelligence tools, they depend too heavily on what others are doing rather than doing the work to discern quality and performance.
Busy leaders make the same poor decisions when they stray from their core expertise. Nonexperts tend to rely on emotional reactions to talent and outside experts rather than more diagnostic criteria.
Of course, this leads to poor choices across any domain where they lack true expertise.
Nonexperts are drawn to cues that are easy to interpret, like brand familiarity, visual polish, or social media reviews. These signals crowd out more objective measures of quality. All this can hamper decisions about the kinds of programs, people, and tools to bring into an organization.
So, brand familiarity, visual polish, and social media reviews crowd out more objective measures of quality when they make decisions regarding which programs, people, and tools to bring into the organization.
Over time, these weak choices can have a tremendously negative impact on the overall quality of the organization.
Nonexpert decision-making is seldom malicious or even careless. The tragedy is that it feels indistinguishable from good judgment to the person exercising it.
A confident choice predicated on superficial criteria carries all the emotional weight of a well-reasoned one, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
Organizations don’t collapse under the weight of one bad hire or one mediocre vendor. They erode slowly, decision by decision, as superficial criteria quietly displace substantive ones until mediocrity becomes the institutional default.
The fix isn’t to demand that nonexperts acquire expertise in every domain, but to invite genuine expertise into the room while decisions are being considered. Leaders can also make nonexperts more discerning by insisting on evidence over familiarity.
Quality is rarely the loudest voice in the room. Organizations that desire great talent, programs, and partners must listen for it anyway.
