Making decisions about mergers, change processes, or even hiring can be nerve racking. Leaders or managers need to consider whether they’ve covered every angle and every option. This includes exploring feelings or biases about a problem and possible obstacles to decision-making. If something doesn’t feel quite right, or the problem seems intractable, there is usually an answer to overcome it, but that answer commonly exists outside of our awareness.

In fact, in our decades of experience in teaching and developing executives, we find that more often than not, most of reality—human reality, social reality, and organizational reality—is explained not just based on cause and effect, but also on associative processes. These processes are outside of the more logical, systematic thinking that one typically employs to solve problems. They might cause us to have a “bad feeling” about something or sometimes to “fall in love” with a deal even though the logic may be shaky. This logical approach often provokes the search for “root cause” explanations (i.e., “Why is this happening?”) that we flee to when things aren’t going according to plan or when we don’t understand something.

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