Asking for advice: why consultation alone may change nothing
In Basel, a decision may involve a pharmaceutical manager, a Rhine logistics specialist and an international R&D team. The managerial question is specific: how can we check whether their advice contributes to judgement rather than merely accompanying a decision already formed?
What the literature establishes
Ilan Yaniv and Eli Kleinberger (2000, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) show that, in estimation tasks, participants give more weight to their own judgement than to advice received. Their experiments also examine how advisers’ reputations develop through their performance. They establish a useful distinction: receiving information and incorporating it into an estimate are different operations.
The asymmetry between personal reasoning and received advice
One proposed mechanism is unequal access to justifications: decision-makers know the reasons behind their own estimate, but not necessarily those behind the adviser’s. Silvia Bonaccio and Reeshad S. Dalal (2006, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) place this explanation within a review of advice-taking research, which considers the characteristics of the decision-maker, the adviser and the task, among other factors. The credibility attributed to advice therefore cannot be reduced to its objective quality.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that decision-makers should follow advice more closely. That would confuse receptiveness to advice with decision quality: poorly informed advice, or advice based on the same information as the initial judgement, does not necessarily provide an independent contribution. The issue is to understand what warrants a revision, not to reward agreement with the adviser. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
Experimental estimation tasks do not reproduce the full complexity of pharmaceutical decisions, which combine regulatory constraints, specialist knowledge and formal responsibilities. Nor does a literature review provide a universal weight to assign to every piece of advice. Finally, an unchanged judgement does not prove that advice was ignored: it may have been considered and rejected for a relevant reason.
A practical check in Bâle
As part of SHR’s « Prise de décision » programme, a Basel life sciences team could test a log of operational forecasts with no direct safety implications, such as the arrival date of R&D materials shipped through Rhine logistics networks. Before consulting a colleague in the international team, the manager would record an initial estimate, followed by the advice received, the final estimate and the reason for maintaining or revising the judgement. Over a period specified in advance, the team would measure the proportion of estimates moved towards the advice and compare mean absolute error before and after consultation, once actual arrival dates were known. This monitoring would check the use and observed usefulness of advice, without being sufficient to establish a causal effect of consultation. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Basel
- decision-making
- Basel
- research
- training basel