We make 35,000 decisions every day. If you stop to count your decisions in a day, then you will probably be hard pressed to come up with more than a few, where you actually thought them through. So where does the rest go?

Well, the marvel of our brain developed millions of years ago to ensure our survival, is that we have an ever vigilant automatic system 1 based on our human instincts around what is safe, interesting, valuable – and what is not. This system will make +95% of your decisions in a day – and that is great for fast decision making.

What is not so great, is when this system 1 proposes decisions to it’s more thoughtful brother, system 2, in a way that sounds great, feels great and makes it easy for system 2 to endorse, but really makes very little rational sense, if you actually stop to think about it. This is the reason that we are rarely stupefied – we almost always have an intuitive answer, that we can relatively quickly rationalize afterwards.

Now many decisions are not that difficult – and many are not that critical. But sometimes you make strategic decisions that make or break a career, a company or even a country. Even if you decide you want to think that one through, you will constantly be bombarded with your system 1 suggestions – and most of the time you will take them, because they certainly sound rational. This is why 70% of all strategic initiatives fail.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come – Maybe it is time for a new way of doing strategy?