Florian Artinger | BIBaP Public Lecture

Frequency, Costs, and Remedies of “Cover-Your-Ass” Behaviour in Organisations

When faced with uncertainty, decision-makers at all levels of the hierarchy admit that between 30% - 50% of their decisions are not made in the best interest of the organisation but rather to protect themselves in case anything goes wrong. This behaviour, colloquially known as “Cover-Your-Ass” (CYA), is so prevalent that it is even listed in the Oxford English Dictionary of Idioms. The potential costs to organisations can be significant. One core challenge is fostering a strong risk culture within the organisation, whereby if something fails the focus should not be on identifying a scapegoat but on understanding the reasons behind the failure. This approach creates opportunities to learn and refine effective decision processes including heuristics-decision strategies that can navigate uncertainty successfully.

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Florian Artinger is a professor of data science and business at the German University of Applied Sciences and an associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He earned his PhD in economics from the Max Planck Institute. His award-winning work has been published in leading international journals and focuses on decision-making under uncertainty. He examines the decision strategies that experts such as managers use in an uncertain world and seeks to address to what extent these strategies may or may not be well adapted to the environment. He is also a co-founder of Simply Rational which bridges research and industry, helping organisations improve decision processes using insights from behavioural science and machine learning. As a Max Planck spin-off, Simply Rational was founded together with Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer, one of the world’s most renowned psychologists.