Upon further review

I suggested below that a decision-making experiment referenced in the HBR was flawed because it used students as a substitute for real decision-makers and then drew some bold conclusions from their behavior.

Another bit of unreality is that the experimenter seems to think that policy is worked out in a relaxed vacuum where the participants bring a tabula rasa to the question they are dealing with and then focus on the facts set before them. This in no way resembles the environment real policy makers describe.

Henry Kissinger:

Any statesman is in part the prisoner of necessity. He is confronted with an environment he did not create, and is shaped by a personal history he can no longer change. It is an illusion to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience. As I have said, the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstances.

Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary in the decade before World War One also dismissed the idea that statesmen and ministers weigh information, make careful plans, and then seek to carry out those plans meticulously:

A minister beset with the administrative work of great office must often be astounded to read of the carefully laid plans … that critics and admirers attribute to him.

Scholars agree. Here is historian John Lewis Gaddis:

[Political scientist Alexander] George has suggested that there exists, for political leaders, something he calls an 'operational code'-a set of assumptions about the world, formed early in one's career, that tend to govern without much subsequent variations the way one responds to crises afterwards.

This does not mean that decision-makers do not use bad analogies (they do but that's another post). It simply means that they do not seize on them because of trivial reasons like the name of their office building. Nor do they pick up the analogy right as they sit down to formulate options. Rather, it seems that they will bring the analogies (good or bad) with them to the problem. The big danger is not that they will be misled by new but irrelevant data. Instead, they are more prone to disregard, ignore, or minimize new information that does not fit their pre-existing framework.