MIT Sloan Management Review Article on A Structured Approach to Strategic Decisions

Reducing errors in judgment requires a disciplined process.

Envision the following situations: A board of directors considers acquiring a competitor. A marketing team decides whether to launch a new product. A venture capital investment committee chooses among an array of startups to fund. All those strategic decisions share a common feature: They are evaluative judgments. To make such tough calls, people must boil down a large amount of complex information. Given how unreliable human judgment is, all evaluations are susceptible to errors.

Dozens of studies on personnel selection have shown conclusively that decisions are more accurate when interviews are structured rather than unstructured. Therefore, a growing number of organizations, especially those that put a high premium on the quality of the talent they hire, have adopted structured interviews.