Inside banks' information and control systems: Post-decision surprise and corporate disruption

•Banks have organizational and cultural susceptibility toward post-decision surprise.•Information systems are operationally sound, advanced and managerially responsive.•Surprise exposes operating deficiencies, weak collective mindfulness and rigid routines.•Bankers' missed early warning signals, denied failure and avoided accountability.•Bankers' refrained from calibrating required mindfulness with decision complexity.•Given important role banks play in our financial world, the results are disturbing.

In response to the catastrophic outcome of the 2008–2009 Financial Crisis we report on a qualitative study of decision maker surprise in the banking industry. Banks use a remarkably sophisticated ensemble of information technologies for supporting their management control systems and enabling oversight by government regulators and industry watchdogs. Banks depend on a global network of data processing and information systems to provide their core banking services and to manage the complex financial and macroeconomic elements of their environment. They are also subject to federal and/or state oversight, which includes on-site examinations and quarterly financial data monitoring, to reaffirm their safety and soundness. Yet, the financial crisis caught them unawares. To get behind the headlines of the crisis, we opted to not study crisis decisions overtly, but rather to explore bankers' general ability to interpret the data that they were receiving via their information technologies and observations and to follow a number of crisis and non-crisis decisions that had surprise outcomes for them.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.