Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is an expert in strategic decision-making, behavioral strategy, and the science of human judgment. Sibony is a professor, author, and advisor specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. He serves as Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and is an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School at Oxford University. Sibony has taught at institutions including London Business School, Ecole Polytechnique, and IE Madrid. At HEC Paris, he received the Vernimmen Prize for teaching excellence. Before his academic career, Sibony spent 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France and the United States, where he was a senior partner and served as a leader of the Global Strategy Practice and the Consumer Goods & Retail Sector.

Sibony is known as a co-author of "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment," written with Daniel Kahneman and Cass R. Sunstein. The book appeared on multiple bestseller lists worldwide, including the New York Times list. In "Noise," Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein examine how noise contributes to errors in fields such as medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, food safety, forensic science, bail verdicts, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection.

Sibony is also the author of "You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake!," which explores common business decision-making traps and practical tools for avoiding them. The book received the Manpower Foundation Grand Prize for best management book of the year and has been translated into multiple languages. Sibony is co-author of "Cracked It! How To Solve Big Problems and Sell Solutions Like Top Strategy Consultants" and a contributor to the French-language strategy textbook "Strategor." He is also the author of the article "Before You Make That Big Decision," co-authored with Daniel Kahneman, which was selected as the cover feature of Harvard Business Review's selection of all-time "10 Must-Reads on Making Smart Decisions."

Sibony's research focuses on applying insights from judgment and decision-making to business strategy, a field he helped define as behavioral strategy. He has written extensively about the effect of cognitive biases on strategic decisions and explored ways to identify and mitigate them. In his work, Sibony advocates decision hygiene—a set of techniques aimed at reducing both bias and noise—and recommends shifting from intuitive to deliberate processes by using checklists, premortems, formal decision protocols, noise audits, and independent assessments. His research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Strategy Science, Long Range Planning, and Research in Economics, as well as practitioner-oriented publications such as Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, MIT Sloan Management Review, and California Management Review.

Sibony holds the title of Knight in the Legion of Honor, one of the highest French awards for contributions to French society. He advises senior leaders on strategic and operational decision-making, serves as a keynote speaker and facilitator of top management and board meetings, and is a member of corporate, advisory, and investment boards.