PERSON
Olivier Sibony
French strategy scholar and former McKinsey senior partner, co-author with Kahneman and Cass Sunstein of Noise (2021), whose research on strategic decision-making translated behavioral findings into organizational practice.
Olivier Sibony spent twenty-five years at McKinsey & Company before joining HEC Paris as Professor of Strategy. His work focuses on how cognitive biases affect executive and strategic decisions, and how organizations can design processes that reduce error. The collaboration with Kahneman began in the 2000s around Kahneman's interest in improving practical decision-making in corporate settings. Their joint work on reducing bias in strategic decisions culminated in the 2021 book Noise, co-authored with Cass Sunstein, which extended the behavioral framework from individual cognitive errors to system-level variability.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Sibony's 2019 book You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake translated decades of behavioral-economics research into a practical framework for organizational decision hygiene. The book prefigured many of the themes of Noise while focusing on individual strategic errors rather than collective inconsistency.
His role in the Noise collaboration was substantial. Kahneman acknowledged Sibony as the co-author who most consistently pushed the analysis toward implementable interventions, insisting that diagnosis without prescription was