Gleb Tsipursky: Never Go With Your Gut — Building Better Decision Systems (Part 2)

Part 1 was the uncomfortable truth: the cognitive biases that lead to disasters in insurance agencies are systematic, predictable, and operate largely below conscious awareness, including in experienced operators who are confident in their judgment. Part 2 is the practical response. If you can't trust your gut to be reliably right, what do you trust? Gleb Tsipursky's answer is a structured decision-making process that doesn't require you to become a different kind of thinker, just one who has better tools.

The Problem With "Going With Your Gut"

Gut instincts are pattern-matching, your brain comparing the current situation to past experiences and flagging the closest match. This is useful and fast, but it has two critical limitations. First, your gut can only match to situations you've experienced before. Novel situations, new markets, new team structures, strategic inflection points the agency hasn't navigated before, don't have good templates in your experiential library. Your gut will still produce an answer, but that answer is based on an imperfect analog rather than the actual situation.

Second, and more insidiously, gut instincts are contaminated by everything that was emotionally significant in your past experience, whether or not that significance was informative. The team member who reminds you of a difficult employee you had five years ago will be assessed partially through that lens. The market opportunity that resembles one you missed out on years ago will be viewed through the emotion of that missed opportunity. These associations feel like insight. They're actually noise.

None of this means your gut is useless. It means gut instinct is one data point, not the final word, and that building a structured process around it dramatically improves outcomes.

The EGRIP Framework

Gleb's decision-making framework is built around five elements: Emotions, Goals, Reality, Integration of Perspectives, and Planning. EGRIP.

Emotions: Acknowledge the emotional state you're in when making the decision. Are you making this call from frustration, from excitement, from fear? Emotional states bias information processing in predictable ways, fear overweights risk, excitement underweights it. The act of naming the emotional context doesn't eliminate the bias, but it reduces its invisible influence.

Goals: Clarify what you're actually trying to accomplish. Decisions made without explicit goal clarity often optimize for the wrong outcome, for what feels good right now rather than what produces the intended result. "What am I trying to accomplish here?" is a deceptively simple question that most decision-makers skip.

Reality: What do you actually know, and what are you assuming? Getting explicit about the distinction between data and inference is one of the highest-leverage elements of the framework. Most bad decisions conflate the two, treating assumptions as facts and ignoring the uncertainty they carry.

Integration of Perspectives: Whose input should inform this decision that you haven't yet consulted? The biases you carry are not the same biases the person across the table from you carries. Deliberate perspective-gathering, specifically from people who are likely to disagree with your current leaning, is one of the most reliable ways to catch errors before they become commitments.

Planning: Before executing, do a pre-mortem. Imagine it's twelve months from now and this decision went badly. What went wrong? This exercise is reliably good at surfacing risks and failure modes that forward-looking optimism misses. It's also uncomfortable in exactly the right way, it forces you to take seriously the possibility that you're wrong.

Building Organizational Decision Culture

Individual decision quality matters, but Gleb's emphasis in the agency context is on building decision quality into the organization's culture, so that good decision processes happen even when the owner isn't in the room.

This requires three things: modeling, systems, and psychological safety.

Modeling means the owner visibly uses structured decision processes and talks about their reasoning out loud. When the team sees the owner say "here's what I'm trying to accomplish, here's what I actually know versus what I'm assuming, here's who I talked to before deciding", they learn that this is how decisions get made here.

Systems means building decision checkpoints into the operational processes that exist at your agency. Major hiring decisions go through a structured evaluation protocol, not just a gut check. Significant financial commitments include a brief written rationale. Carrier selection decisions include a devil's advocate review. These don't need to be elaborate, they just need to exist and be used consistently.

Psychological safety means team members feel safe surfacing concerns and disagreements without fear of reprisal. The single most reliable predictor of whether an organization catches its errors before they become disasters is whether people below the decision-maker feel safe saying "I think there's a problem with this." Organizations where disagreement is discouraged learn about their mistakes after the damage is done.

The Particular Risk of Overconfidence in Insurance

Gleb identifies overconfidence as the meta-bias, the one that makes all the others more dangerous. Overconfident operators don't build in the safeguards because they don't believe the safeguards are necessary for people with their level of judgment. Overconfident operators dismiss concerns from their team because their experience tells them they know better. Overconfident operators take risks that objectively do not have favorable expected value because their gut tells them it'll work out.

Insurance agency owners who have had sustained success are particularly vulnerable here. Success produces confidence, and confidence produces the belief that what worked before will work again, even when the conditions have changed.

The calibrated response to success is not self-doubt. It's intellectual humility, the recognition that past success is evidence of capability, not immunity to future failure, and that the conditions that produced past success may not persist.

What This Means for Your Agency

Implement one element of the EGRIP framework on the next significant decision you face. Start with Goals, just write down explicitly what you're trying to accomplish before proceeding. Do the pre-mortem before you commit. These are small practices, but their cumulative effect on decision quality over time is significant.

The Bottom Line

The agency owners who make fewer catastrophic errors are not luckier or smarter. They have better processes. Gleb Tsipursky's framework gives you the tools to build those processes into your own decision-making and into your organization's culture. The gut is a starting point. The structure is what separates good outcomes from disasters.

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This is Part 2 of a 2-part conversation with Gleb Tsipursky.

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