Lessons from Everest

According to the article written by Michael Roberto, “ Lessons from Everest,” leadership and making decision it is a dynamic process that plays important roles in everyone’s life. Therefore, understanding cognitive biases, team beliefs about interpersonal risk taking, and system complexity are the keys lessons to promote success and prevent failure in any social organization (Roberto). As he exposed in his article, lack of one of those keys could result in a life and death situation.

The 1996 Mount Everest tragedy occurred when member of those teams got caught in terrible storms trying to climb the mount. Roberto uses the analogy of Mount Everest to explain the process of decision-making in an organization. Therefore, he implies that “bad decisions are most often made by bad leaders.” Researches had shown that many aspects of this event were part of human error.

What make a situation a catastrophe? Roberto implies that a tragedy such as Mount Everest could be avoided. But at first, managers or leaders should be able to understand the importance of visualizing its causes and identifying its mistakes, so it can prevent future disasters. In his view, these are learning experience that can apply to any upper or lower management situation.

Cognitive biases, which are distortions in the way organization, perceive reality, impact judgment and choices made by the organization or individuals. For example, the climbers expressed overconfidence over a challenge, even though the climbers were uncertain over their own limits. In addition, some climbers even expressed their inability to complete this event, but it was ignored due overcommitted.

Roberto explains that lack of shared beliefs caused a negative impact in this specific group; he argues that the climbers had a lack of familiarity with each other, once they did feel comfortable with each other.

Complex systems exposed that there are many causes for this incident, which are not isolated factors. Roberto...