Decision Fatigue, then Wishful Thinking

In the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” Maya Harris, a CIA officer in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, calls her superior, Dan Fuller, to discuss potentially tracking down bid Laden’s secret courier. 

After Harris graduated college, she was hired by the CIA and has spent her entire career studying bin Laden. Harris has become the expert on him; she has evaluated his behavior, pre 9/11 and post. As the conversation becomes heated, Fuller listens to Harris’ reasoning and says, “In other words, you want it to be true.” Harris’ decision-making is based on her incredible expert knowledge of bin Laden and a degree of wishful thinking. She has been working her entire professional life to find him and is “hopeful” for any good lead to be manifested.

When we have a specific result — whether it’s finding the elusive bin Laden or selecting a quarterback in the NFL draft — we search for clues to advance our position toward our ultimate goal. That also means we often dismiss the obvious. We invent reasons why what appears to be a conspicuous threat is not concerning. This occurs all the time in any professional sports league draft or when hiring for our organization. We make an excuse, which then keeps our wishful thinking alive. We throw logic and reason out the window to complete the task with the results we needed. It’s not intentional; it’s only because we become decision fatigued, we become tired of our search, then we give in. 

Harris was tired. She was exhausted from the search, so as she used her deductive reasoning, her expertise, to go from A-B, she then allowed wishful thinking to carry her across the goal line. In this case, she was right — to which she would proclaim she had a “gut” instinct (We love to cite our “gut” instincts when right). Too often, though, those gut instincts fall well short, in part because exhaustion has taken away our objectivity. 

Our main job as decision-makers is never to get tired of processing the information.  We have to be relentless in our quest to continue to examine, never settling or having decision-making fatigue, which then leads to wishful thinking. Once decision fatigue sets in, wishful thinking isn’t too far behind.