What casinos teach us about decision-making: Will Bennis for HN

What if part of what we call cognitive bias in management presentations is not a flaw in judgment, but a reasonable adaptation to the environment?
In an interview for Hospodářské noviny, Will Bennis from Decision Lab Prague shows why complex models often fail in uncertain times and why it is sometimes more useful to understand the context than to label decisions as irrational.

Will Bennis is a research psychologist and one of our members. In his work, he has long been interested in how culture and environment shape our judgments about what is “rational,” “right,” or “adaptive.”

In an interview with HN (published on February 4, 2026), he draws on an unusual experience: his career did not start in a laboratory, but at blackjack tables. First as a player, later as a croupier. He uses this environment as a “probe” into how people deal with risk, chance, and uncertainty.

What to take away from this in practice

In the interview, Bennis points out that in uncertain situations, adding more layers of complex models often does not help. It is much more important to understand the context in which people make decisions: what is at stake for them, what experiences they have, and what signals the environment gives them. What appears to be “irrationality” from the outside may be a functional strategy in the given circumstances, and the first step toward better decisions is to stop automatically labeling and start asking “why” more often.

The interview with Will Bennis was published in Hospodářské noviny under the title “Complex strategies fail in uncertain times…” and is worth reading for anyone involved in management, investment, or the public sector who has to make decisions under pressure and uncertainty.