“A conscious leader always uses statistical data and calculates probability in order to make the right decisions.” Before I reached the point where I could make this sentence, my journey, starting Master of Business Administration, taking the “Behavioral Finance” elective course, examining many sources, and reading the Nobel Prize-winning author Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” had a great impact on me.

According to Daniel Kahneman, people make decisions in two different ways, subconsciously or consciously. Making decisions with the subconscious mind can also be called making decisions with our intuitions or emotions. Conscious decision-making is a form of decision-making that we can do with logic, with our rational brain, by evaluating statistical data, using mathematics and calculating probability. This also requires concentration and ability to manage emotions.

Unfortunately, due to overconfidence or laziness, the vast majority of people make decisions based on their intuition. A very small minority knows the importance of being able to make decisions consciously, and they make their decisions by calculation and effort.

Making a decision with the subconscious mind can cause us to make the right decisions under one single condition. For example, a person can master the game of chess by working 10.000 hours, as Malcolm Gladwell states in his book “Outliers.” The information obtained in these conscious studies to learn chess is transferred to the subconscious mind every night during sleep, and by accumulating in this way, the subconscious mind becomes specialized. After a certain period of time, the chess player directs his actions not consciously, but according to the instructions coming from subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is sometimes called “auto-pilot”. For example, when a risky situation occurs that will cause us to have an accident while driving, the auto-pilot comes into play and saves our lives by making the right decisions in an incredibly short time, much more skillfully than we could consciously do.

However, the most important detail that people do not know is that our subconscious mind is not an expert in every subject and can only make correct and successful decisions by studying a subject for a long time, as a chess player who makes practice for more than 10.000 hours. People fall into the trap of making decisions intuitively every time without knowing this detail.

In most of his book, Daniel Kahneman gives examples about how people are influenced by the context or environmental factors when making subconscious decisions. Although he does not say it directly, he also reveals from this book that organizations that know how to influence people’s psychological structure and subconscious mind can influence or manipulate people when they make decisions.

Statue of Zeus, who has plenty of time to think, Mount Nemrut in Adiyaman, Turkey (Pictures taken by the author).

In the light of all this information, a successful leader should not only be able to make conscious decisions, but also be aware that the people with whom he is in communication tend to make decisions subconsciously, and therefore they are also weak to the effects of environmental conditions.

The next stage of this, Emotional Intelligence, the ability to understand and manage emotions of both our own and the people around us, will be the subject matter of another short article.