What was I thinking? Common traps in administrative decision making of superintendents and principals

School Administrator, June, 2005 by Stephen H. Davis

Over the past quarter-century, schools and school districts have become increasingly turbulent, pluralistic and unpredictable places to lead. On any given day, conflicting values, ideas, preferences, interests, needs, demands, problems and solutions descend upon the typical school leader from a shifting array of individuals and groups, each with fluctuating degrees of influence and power.

As a result, many administrative decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events.

Although superintendents and principals work hard to bring order and structure to the arrhythmic nature of organizational life, schools consist of a "mixture of structured and unstructured activities, formal and informal procedures, and controlled and autonomous behaviors," says E. Mark Hanson, author of Educational Administration and Organizational Behavior. Such challenges, in concert with increased demands for accountability and educational reform, underscore the need for administrators with highly effective decision-making skills and sound judgment.

In school districts, decision makers and their decisions are rarely perfectly objective. More importantly, decisions rarely produce perfect or optimal outcomes. This is because the most important decisions are often highly complex. Information may be incomplete, inaccurate, poorly understood or ambiguous. Organizational and/or decision-maker goals may be unclear or subject to disagreement, and decision-making processes are often uneven.

Moreover, the technology of schooling (that is, what works and how) is very difficult to generalize. What works in one setting or context may not work as well in another. Many variables beyond the control of the decision maker can influence how management decisions are carried out and what effects they might have on school operations and outcomes.

Imperfections in decision making also occur when biases distort the decision maker's ability to apply objective or logical thinking. Biases can appear in several ways: (a) when the information used by the decision maker is inaccurate, incomplete, one-sided or based on unethical or immoral perspectives; (b) when the decision maker's preferences or professional ideologies obscure objectivity; (c) when political influences or conflicts cause the decision maker to deviate from normative decision-making approaches or organizational goals; or (d) when the decision maker's motives are self-serving and not in the best interests of the school or district.

Of course, truncated or flawed analytical or logical thought processes also can diminish the quality of administrative decisions. Given the frequency and intensity of problems and dilemmas that confront school leaders, opportunities for orderly and deliberative thinking can be few and far between, thus increasing the possibility that errors in logic and analysis will contaminate decision making.

Cognitive Traps

Following are 15 cognitive traps common to managers in all types of organizations, but especially schools. They are derived from the large body of literature on both educational and private-sector managerial decision making. It should be noted there are no fail-safe strategies that can help leaders avoid or reduce the damaging effects that such traps so often inflict upon decision-making processes and their outcomes.

However, the following typology and examples drawn from school leadership may help administrators enhance their ability to anticipate, recognize and mitigate the adverse effects that such traps can have on decision effectiveness.

* No. 1: Presumed associations.

Leaders often overestimate the probability that two events will co-occur. For example, some school administrators believe that an increase in the number of minority students will automatically result in an increase in disciplinary infractions, truancy rates and lower test scores. While this may indeed occur in some school settings, such presumed associations can create unreasonable expectations about what minority students will or will not do, thus leading to a perverse and durable halo effect that virtually guarantees an increase in disciplinary infractions, truancy and poor test scores among minority students.

* No. 2: Insensitivity to base rates.

It is not uncommon for leaders to ignore base rates when assessing the likelihood that a particular event will occur. For example, there is an old saying among veteran school administrators that five percent of a school district's constituency creates 95 percent of a superintendent's headaches. The emotional intensity of interactions between administrators and disgruntled constituents can belie the fact that the base rate of such interactions is actually quite small. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for administrators to feel overwhelmed by the perceived frequency of emotionally charged conflicts when in fact they typically represent only a small number of the interpersonal interactions that occur over a given time period.

* No. 3: Insensitivity to sample size.