The quality of strategic decisions of executives is directly related to the ability they have to find creative alternatives when facing business problems. These alternatives could be generated intuitively, using heuristics. On the other hand, the researches on alternatives generation have consistently indicated that people are not efficient on this duty. The argument for that, contained in the decision's literature, is not conclusive and it allows speculation about it. To explore this issue and relate it to the Brazilian Administration, an experiment was designed for 174 students of four courses of MBA. The experiment and the analysis were resulted from the confluence between the experimental research from decision cognitive psychology with science's vision of the traditional organizational decision and the new field of study on naturalistic or intuitive decisions. To measure the creativity of the alternatives presented during the experiment, the concept of hierarchical tree was utilized and it has proved a powerful tool to the typology of alternatives. The result of this experiment confirmed the poor performance in alternatives generation by managers and at the same time, indicated that probably, the generation of options isolated of analysis can produce better quality of alternatives. The heuristic, do not demonstrated any influence on options generated.
Strategic decision; Intuition; Experiment; Option-generating; Hierarchical tree
