The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Making Smart Decisions

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Making Smart Decisions

Traditional Playbook: Most business advice promotes conducting research, doing a thorough analysis, and relying on the “data” to make decisions. It’s about turning to reports, metrics, market studies and weighing the pros and cons to ensure choices are rational and risks are minimized.

The Problem: While logical and prudent, this approach can be slow and overly analytical, resulting in “paralysis by analysis.” It can also leave you exposed to being blindsided as a result of narrow framing, overconfidence, biases like confirmation and recency. End result, your agonized decision-making process may have made it feel like you were weighing the pros and cons, but really you were essentially taking a stab in the dark because of all the unknowables. Moreover, an over-reliance on facts means you overlooked valuable intuition or subconscious insights.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: There’s growing evidence we only use a tiny fraction of our mental/physical capabilities. Think about that time you were focused on a conversation in a noisy, crowded room and through the din you somehow heard your name mentioned in a distant corner. How did that happen? Analytical thinking is good. But unlocking the mostly untapped potential of our “extended mind” — our right brain and gut — could result in a significant boost for mental processing power. The idea is NOT to be irrational and impulsive but to use these intuitive signals to complement your rational analysis, making decisions more agile and aligned with real-world nuances.

How to Make It Happen

• Get in touch with your “extended mind.” In her book of the same name, Annie Murphy Paul recommends keeping an “interoceptive journal” to note how your body felt when making a decision. She cites studies of Wall Street traders who seem to make more money when they’re better at reading their own body signals, hunters who pick up environmental cues, and doctors whose own body reactions can help in diagnosing patients.
• Practice rapid decision-making in small scenarios to build confidence in trusting your instincts and experience. (Most decisions, whether it’s looking at a menu or choosing a new brand of toilet paper for your store bathroom, shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.)
• Try to reconnect and learn from emotions that have historically been labeled as negative and see them as signals and sources of information. “Instead of trying to repress them, if we listen to them, they can be very helpful in informing our decisions,” says Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist and author of “Tiny Experiments.”
• Humans’ more developed prefrontal cortex—which is responsible for planning and emotion control—is one of the key features that sets us apart from other species. But when it comes to creative thinking, it’s the deeper parts of our brain — the subconscious — that may be the real supercomputer. Yet to bring the subconscious into action usually requires taking a break from worrying about the problem at hand. “Living in that problem space and falling in love with your problems is one of the most powerful ways to unlock really innovative solutions,” says Stanford business professor Tina Seelig.
• Reflect on past decisions. When did your gut prove reliable, and when did it mislead you? Use these lessons to refine your judgment.
• Ascertain whether an issue is one better suited for analysis or intuition. “If it’s a decision that’s recurring, and amenable to improvement, you should invest in gathering data, doing analysis, and examining failure factors,” says Babson College professor Tom Davenport, author of “Thinking for a Living.” “[Otherwise,] you might as well go with your experience and intuition.”
• There are many caveats here: the reason the gut is so effective is that it simplifies stories while still incorporating deep-seated subconscious activity. But be aware of biases—question whether your gut is being influenced by recent experiences, emotions, or just lazy assumptions.