The Strategic Benefits of Randomized Decision-Making

In highly ambiguous and challenging contexts, a random approach to decision-making confers a number of advantages. Operations managers have been using randomized decision-making since World War II (randomized search was used to locate enemy submarines in the open ocean), but it has not yet been seriously applied to strategic decision-making, which remains focused on hypothesis formulation and testing.  In this article the authors explain the strategic benefits of randomized decision making — early advantage, faster learning, less predictability, and reduced biases — and offer advice on how to incorporate randomness in the strategy-making process.