In the high-stakes solitude of executive judgment, the forces shaping a decision are often invisible to the one making it. A new collaboration between The Economic Times and the London School of Economics seeks to change that — bringing together senior leaders from around the world to examine not just what they decide, but how the architecture of their own minds, and the systems around them, quietly determines the outcome. The program rests on a quiet but consequential insight: awareness of bias is not the same as immunity to it, and the most experienced leaders may be the most vulnerable.
Cognitive biases shape executive decisions; LSE-ET program teaches debiasing
Experience can narrow vision as much as it sharpens it
Mark
So the program is really about teaching executives to notice their own blind spots. But how do you actually do that in a room full of people who got where they are by trusting their instincts?
Mimi
That's the tension at the heart of it. Experience is real—it's valuable. But it can also calcify into assumption. The module doesn't ask leaders to distrust their judgment. It asks them to slow down and examine it. To ask: what am I assuming here? What information am I ignoring? What would change my mind?
Luke
But here's what I want to know: is there evidence this actually works? The program teaches frameworks for debiasing. Do leaders who go through it actually make better decisions afterward? Or do they just feel more confident that they're thinking clearly?
Mimi
That's a fair question. The program is built on behavioral decision research—Dr. Fasolo's work is grounded in that literature. But the source material doesn't provide data on outcomes for program alumni. We know the framework exists. We don't know yet how it translates to actual business results.
Mark
The piece mentions choice architecture—designing the decision environment itself. That seems like it might matter more than individual awareness. If the system encourages questioning, people question. If it doesn't, they don't.
Mimi
Exactly. And that's actually a shift in responsibility. It's not just about making the executive smarter. It's about making the organization's decision-making processes smarter. That's a bigger lever.
Luke
Thirty leaders from around the world—that's a small cohort. How much can a program like this actually move the needle on how business decisions get made globally?
Mimi
It's a pilot, in a sense. These are influential people. If they go back to their organizations and change how decisions get made there, the ripple could be significant. But you're right to flag that thirty is a small number in a world of millions of executives.
Mark
The program also touches on negotiation and cross-cultural leadership. That feels like a different skill than debiasing. Are those connected?
Mimi
They are, actually. Once you've made a decision, you have to get others to move with you. That requires understanding how different people interpret information, what assumptions they're working from. It's debiasing applied to communication and alignment.
Luke
But the source doesn't give us detail on how those pieces fit together. We know they're in the program. We don't know how they're integrated or what the actual curriculum looks like.
Mimi
True. The reporting is more about the philosophy and the problem the program is trying to solve than about the mechanics of how it's taught.
The Pulse
- Executives routinely make high-stakes decisions under time pressure and incomplete information, often unaware that cognitive shortcuts — not evidence — are driving the choice.
- Past success is itself a trap: the strategies and patterns that built a leader's confidence can blind them to conditions that no longer resemble the ones they mastered.
- The Economic Times and LSE have launched a leadership program bringing together founders and CEOs to practice deliberate thinking — not just cataloguing biases, but learning to catch them mid-thought.
- Individual debiasing is not enough; the real leverage lies in organizational design — whether a company's processes make it safe to challenge assumptions or quietly punish those who do.
- The program is landing on a broader redefinition of strategic leadership: less about certainty and data mastery, more about building conscious, questioning systems around every consequential decision.
In the high-stakes solitude of executive judgment, the forces shaping a decision are often invisible to the one making it. A new collaboration between The Economic Times and the London School of Economics seeks to change that — bringing together senior leaders from around the world to examine not just what they decide, but how the architecture of their own minds, and the systems around them, quietly determines the outcome. The program rests on a quiet but consequential insight: awareness of bias is not the same as immunity to it, and the most experienced leaders may be the most vulnerable.
In the corner office, decisions are made on incomplete information, under pressure, with consequences that may not surface for years. What the executive rarely sees is the invisible hand shaping her choice — the cognitive biases that have been quietly steering her judgment since the moment she framed the problem.
A new collaboration between The Economic Times and the London School of Economics, called High-Performance Leadership & Strategic Decision-Making, brings together thirty founders and chief executives for an intensive course built on a single premise: knowing that biases exist is not enough. What matters is understanding how they operate inside your own mind — and then building systems that catch them before they harden into strategy.
The challenge cuts deepest for experienced leaders. A strategy that worked in one market becomes a template for the next, even when conditions have shifted entirely. Success itself can narrow vision. The executive who has navigated three market downturns may be the one most likely to miss the fourth, because it doesn't look like the others.
Dr. Barbara Fasolo, who leads the cognitive biases module, teaches leaders not merely to catalog their shortcuts — anchoring, confirmation bias, availability heuristic — but to recognize when they are making assumptions, actively consider alternatives they might dismiss, and challenge their initial read before committing resources. The goal is a habit of deliberate thinking.
Yet individual awareness only goes so far. Strategic choices flow through teams, through organizational processes, through the way information gets framed. Choice architecture matters: a decision environment that makes it safe to challenge assumptions produces different outcomes than one that simply reinforces what leadership has already decided. Leaders carry responsibility not just for their own judgment, but for the systems around them.
Better decision-making, the program argues, is not about eliminating uncertainty. It is about developing a more conscious understanding of how judgment forms — and ensuring that the environment around every consequential choice supports, rather than quietly undermines, the thinking required to make it well.
The corner office is where decisions get made on incomplete information, under time pressure, with consequences that may not surface for years. A senior executive sits across from a spreadsheet, a market report, a competitor's move. She has to choose which data matters, how to read it, and which path forward deserves the bet. What she often doesn't see is the invisible hand shaping that choice—the cognitive biases that have been quietly steering her judgment since the moment she framed the problem.
This is the territory that a new collaboration between The Economic Times and the London School of Economics & Political Science has set out to map. The program, called High-Performance Leadership & Strategic Decision-Making, brings together thirty founders, chief executives, and business leaders from around the world for an intensive course designed to make them more deliberate in how they think. The premise is straightforward: knowing that biases exist is not enough. What matters is understanding how they actually work inside your own mind, and then building systems and processes that catch them before they calcify into strategy.
The challenge cuts deeper for experienced leaders than it does for newcomers. A strategy that worked in one market becomes a template for the next one, even when the underlying conditions have shifted entirely. A pattern that succeeded five years ago becomes the lens through which a leader sees today's problem. Success itself can narrow vision. Experience offers genuine value—context, pattern recognition, the weight of things tried and learned. But it also builds confidence in assumptions that may no longer hold. The executive who has navigated three market downturns may be the one most likely to miss the fourth one, because it doesn't look like the others.
Dr. Barbara Fasolo, who leads the cognitive biases module of the program, focuses her work on how people actually make judgments under uncertainty. The module does not simply catalog the biases—anchoring, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, the long list of ways the human mind takes shortcuts. Instead, it teaches leaders to recognize when they are making assumptions, to actively consider alternatives they might otherwise dismiss, and to challenge their initial read of a situation before committing resources to it. The work is about building a habit of deliberate thinking.
But individual awareness only goes so far. Executives rarely make strategic decisions alone. Choices flow through leadership teams, through organizational processes, through the way information gets presented and alternatives get framed. This is where choice architecture enters the picture—the insight that how a decision gets structured shapes what choice a leader will make. A program designed to encourage teams to question established views will produce different decisions than one that simply reinforces what leadership has already decided. Leaders, then, carry responsibility not just for their own judgment but for the systems around them. Do the processes in your organization make it safe to challenge assumptions, or do they punish dissent?
Once a strategic choice has been made, the work is far from finished. Leaders must communicate the decision, build alignment across teams with different interests, and navigate perspectives that may conflict sharply. This requires soft power, cross-cultural fluency, and the ability to negotiate without simply imposing. Better decision-making, in other words, is not about eliminating uncertainty or leaning entirely on data and experience. It is about developing a more conscious understanding of how judgment forms, what forces are shaping it, and how the decision environment around you can either support or undermine the choices that follow. For leaders navigating complexity, that deliberateness may be the most valuable capability they can develop.
Notable Quotes
Experience provides valuable context and pattern recognition, but it can also create assumptions about what is likely to work— Program framework
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