سیستم اطلاعات و کنترل در داخل بانک ها: سورپرایز بعد از تصمیم و اختلال شرکت های بزرگ

Our focus is on understanding the context, process and patterns of decisions that resulted in surprise outcomes for bankers. We interviewed 23 senior executives from banks in the southeast who recounted fifty-one post-decision surprises that had occurred between 2008 and 2010. From analyzing those interviews, we found that they attributed surprise outcomes of their decisions to specific behaviors, including their complacency and over-confidence, their over-trusting of others, their deviation from protocol, their habitual information reporting and decisioning efforts, and their deficient detection of warning signals. In addition they tended to rationalize surprise outcomes by diverting blame to others. Combined, these symptoms reveal a chronic organizational and cultural susceptibility for being surprised. It was evident from our analysis that the bankers exhibited a narrow focus of attention and a reduced sense of inquiry, refrained from calibrating their mindfulness with the complexity of their decisions, limited their sense of accountability and experienced rigidity in procedures from bank routines and information standardization. Together, these elements nurtured less-mindful behavior and triggered surprise outcomes. Given the important role banks play in our financial world and the ineffectiveness of their elaborate information support systems for reliable management control the results are disturbing.