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Why Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is the book every executive stepping into an industrial transition assignment should have read before arriving. By Mounir Telkass, founder of MT-Transition.
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Daniel Kahneman was a psychologist. In 2002, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics — because his research demonstrated that humans do not decide rationally. Not occasionally. Structurally. His book, published in 2011, distills forty years of research into how the brain produces systematic, predictable errors of judgment.
This is not a self-help book. It is a treatise on cognitive psychology. Kahneman does not explain how to “decide better.” He describes with precision the conditions under which your brain fails you — without your knowing it.
In a transition management assignment, where every week counts and decisions are made under uncertainty, under pressure, with incomplete information, this is exactly the context in which the biases he describes become most dangerous. And most frequent.
Kahneman describes two modes of brain function. System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional. It runs constantly, effortlessly, without conscious awareness. System 2 is slow, analytical, deliberate. It consumes mental energy. It can process complex information, weigh options, override System 1’s intuitions.
The problem: System 2 is lazy. It delegates to System 1 whenever it can. And under pressure — urgency, fatigue, high cognitive load — System 1 takes almost complete control. In industrial crisis management, this is precisely the worst moment to leave System 1 alone at the controls. The decisions with the heaviest consequences — layoff plans, capex arbitrations, management reorganizations — are often made in the first few weeks of the assignment.
Kahneman’s signature technique: forcing System 2 into strategic decisions. Concretely: deliberately slow down the decision process, require writing before speaking, institutionalize a devil’s advocate role within the executive committee. This is not indecision. It is cognitive discipline — particularly useful for a transition general manager.
WYSIATI stands for “What You See Is All There Is.” The brain does not go looking for missing information. It builds a coherent story from the data available — and the more coherent the story, the higher the confidence.
When a transition director arrives on site, the first information they receive is whatever the incumbent team chooses to show them. System 1 immediately builds a narrative from that data. Except the missing data was the most important: the supplier disputes nobody was reporting, the scrap hidden inside the month-end statistics.
The concrete countermeasure: at the start of an assignment, force yourself to explicitly list what you don’t know yet — and treat that list as a priority equal to what you do know. What Kahneman calls a “pre-mortem”: before deciding, imagine the decision has already failed, and ask why.
The halo effect is simple: if your first interaction with someone is positive, you will evaluate all their subsequent contributions with a positive bias. And vice versa.
For a transition director, this is one of the most frequent and most costly mistakes of the first few weeks. The person who complains from day one about the previous management is perceived as loyal and courageous. The person who defends the past track record is perceived as resistant to change. Except reality is often the opposite.
The countermeasure: defer judgments about people. Impose a personal rule: no definitive judgment on a manager before 30 days minimum and three distinct observed situations. A useful principle for any transition HR director tasked with assessing an inherited leadership team.
Fine chemicals site, 180 employees. Results deteriorating over 18 months. Group management mandates a transition site director with a clear objective: diagnosis in 4 weeks, turnaround plan at 90 days.
Week 1. The production manager is the first to welcome the site director on the shop floor. Available, structured, knows his numbers by heart. Immediate halo.
Week 2. The site director receives a summary report prepared by the incumbent management team. WYSIATI activates: the brain builds a coherent narrative.
Week 3. The site director imposes a systematic shop-floor review with an explicit list of what he doesn’t know yet. What he discovers: the 87% service rate is hiding a “degraded mode” that has been quietly accepted for 6 months.
System 2 forced — the site director delays the diagnosis handover by two weeks and convenes three separate meetings with operators, with no middle management present. The real diagnosis contradicts the initial narrative: the problem is operational and structural.
In a crisis, the fast brain (System 1) takes over. Forcing System 2 into strategic decisions is not indecision — it is discipline. Institutionalize it through process, not goodwill.
The brain builds a coherent story from what it sees — without looking for what’s missing. Start every diagnosis with an explicit list of what you don’t know yet.
The first impression of a person contaminates everything that follows. Systematically defer definitive judgments on managers to 30 days minimum.
Kahneman never claimed biases could be eliminated. He showed that they can be anticipated, recognized, and offset by processes built to compensate for them. That is precisely the difference between an executive who “trusts their gut” and one who understands why their gut can betray them.Mounir Telkass — MT-Transition, industrial transition management firm.
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