Big Decision? Assess It Both Drunk and Sober...

When faced with a big decision, take a lesson from the ancient Persians.

Herodotus, the Greek historian, reported that the ancient Persians tended to deliberate on important matters while they were drunk. They then reconsidered their decisions the following day when they were sober. If it happened that their first deliberation took place when they were sober, they would always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine. If a decision was approved both drunk and sober, the decision held; if not, the Persians set it aside.

This story always draws a chuckle when I tell it to management audiences. Joking proposals are inevitably made to adopt the practice regarding the wine. The funny thing is that many already do make decisions in a state like intoxication. What is needed is the additional reconsideration while sober.

The emotion that goes along with a big takeover or some other event that accompanies a major shift in strategy often produces what Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist, calls a “hot” state in his best-selling book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Ariely vividly explains that people in hot, or emotionally aroused, states will make decisions that they would not otherwise make when in a dispassionate, or cold, emotional state. He details a number of experiments where subjects in a cold state were asked to predict their sexual and moral responses to a number of scenarios. The same questions were asked while the subjects were in a state of sexual arousal.

As Ariely observed, “the conclusions were consistent and clear—overwhelmingly clear, frighteningly clear.” In every case, the subjects responded very differently when in hot versus cold states. The subjects’ propensity toward odd sexual activities, immoral actions and unsafe sex were not only substantially higher, but the participants in Ariely’s studies were unable to predict the degree to which passion would change them.

Behavioral economists have demonstrated the dangers of hot versus cold decision-making in numerous aspects of business, as well. Take the concept of competitive arousal, also known as auction fever, where participants in auctions or other competitive situations adopt a “win at any cost” posture, in which winning becomes not just about the outcome but also beating the competition.

Skilled negotiators know how to manipulate this tendency, such as when investment bankers and real estate brokers convince potential buyers that they are bidding against unnamed rivals under a tight deadline, when neither the rivals nor the deadline exist.

The Persians, in a sense, were just acknowledging reality when they mandated a wine-induced hot state analysis of their decisions. Their real innovation was to mandate a subsequent cold state deliberation. It’s hard to argue with their success. They ruled much of western and central Asia for almost 300 years.

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Chunka Mui is a business advisor and author of three books on strategy and innovation including, most recently, The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups.  Follow him here at LinkedIn, and also at Forbes and Twitter.  This article was originally published at Forbes.