The art (and science) of decision making
Once I had to buy a printer for our team and I ended up spending 6 hours to choose, sitting in the office, which printer to buy. At the end of it, while I was able to make a good decision, I was fairly disappointed by the sheer amount of time and effort I wasted on such a noncritical thing.
“I struggle to make decisions and sometimes linger on it so much that it leads to inaction.” If this seems familiar to you, you are in the right place. Millions of people struggle with making decisions in both their personal and professional life on a day to day basis. From choosing big decisions such as which career option to choose from to tasks as small as which toothpaste to use. Most people either take their decisions entirely driven through their emotions, while some base it entirely on reasoning. However, as I have come to realize, it is not a question of “or”, but of “And”. Decisions have to be made through a combination of an intuitive process (past experiences etc) and analytical reasoning (facts and available knowledge).
I have, from my experiences of making decisions and analyzing them have come up with a 3 step process that helped me become more decisive: IWC i.e. Identify, Weigh & Choose!
Identify: The first step before making a good decision is to identify what decision you have to make exactly. You need to identify which part of the problem specifically is the bottleneck that you have to decide for, essentially breaking the problem down! And that’s the most tricky part! Let’s understand it through an example.
Often college students during the placements have to decide their career paths. They want to decide which start-up they should be joining. When I am asked this, I ask in return: Why do you want to join a particular start-up and then depending on the answer we re-model the question. If the answer is “Fast learning curve”, we re-state the decision statement to be: Which start-up would offer me a faster learning curve?
By doing this we get clarity on the direction in which we need to go forward which is critical for the second step then we weigh the problem on the parameters.
Weigh the alternatives with the help of 4 parameters mentioned below. For each parameter, you can use a rating system or weighted scoring!
- Confidence from Past Experiences: This takes into account your comfortability in making certain kinds of decisions. Our minds inherently connect with similar decisions that we have made in the past and give us a confidence rating, purely based on emotions!
- Comfort with risk (stakes): Once the decision is made, there will be an outcome, favorable or not. If the outcome is an unfavorable one, to what extent will you be okay with that risk? Are the stakes too high?
- Amount of knowledge present (complexity of the process): How much knowledge do you already have on the decision statement? Are you able to see the flow of actions that will lead to a certain outcome?
- Interlinkages & dependencies: This is often the most missed parameter. We as human beings try to break down the problems to such an extent that we forget about its interdependency on other things. Decisions that have the possibility of affecting a larger ecosystem than what’s visible tend out to be the most difficult ones to make!
Lets’ take an example of hiring in a company for the head of an innovative project that the company wants to pursue.
- If the company has good leaders, the HR team will be confident from past experiences in hiring
- Is the project critical for the company? Is it a make or break or something which is good to have? If they are just trying something new, they can afford to take risks
- What is the project about? Does the technical team of the company have the previous knowhow? The Leaders of the restaurant chain that wants to set up a food delivery system in place would have little knowledge about the intricacies and hence their judgment of the person during hiring may be limited.
- How does the hiring of the head affect the project? Since the person is the leader, all the progress and the productivity of others will be dependent on him, hence, a high amount of interlinkage!
Choose one option from the alternatives available once you have weighed all the evidence and take that decision.
Note: Once the decision is taken, it is very important that you come to peace with it. The expectation that all the decisions we will make will be perfect is a completely unreasonable one, and often we often spend a lot of energy overthinking. This may sound counterintuitive to the framework that I suggested above but I strongly feel that we should let ourselves be at ease once we made a certain decision and irrespective of the outcome, should be prepared to accept whatever comes out of it.