The Future of Decision Making

A New Model for Decision Making

Everyone in your organization wants to make good decisions, but many people make bad ones because they’ve learned the wrong model for decision making. They count on logic, data and “conventional wisdom.” That approach may work in simple situations where information is readily available, but in most instances, it works against you because “decision making is largely an unconscious process.”

To begin to improve your decision making, discard the idea that you’re a rational decision maker. Like all human beings, you make your best assessments intuitively, using a feeling, a “gut instinct” or a hunch. Your best judgments are “based on accumulated experience.” When presented with an issue, your subconscious mind reviews related situations from your past, the choices you made and how those worked, and then it generates new options. The finest decisions “flow from goal conflict adjudication” – juggling several conflicting factors at once – rather than “half-baked logic.” For example, a captain at the helm of a freighter traveling through the Suez Canal knows it’s better to push through than to stop and deal with an onboard boiler fire. Why? ...