Creating Psychological Distance

• Why are we taking this decision?
• What do we think will happen if we do?
• Is the benefit of taking this decision proportional to the risk?
• Do we have a common understanding and position on the situation? In the case of a firefighting mission, this would mean ensuring th...

By methodically assessing your options against a comprehensive set of objectives, it is possible that one option will emerge as the obvious decision to take. In many instances, though, more work will be needed.

One can consider each of your options separately, listing the ...

• First, what are the objectives behind your decision?
• Next, what weight (from 0-100 per cent) would you assign to each objective: ie, how important is this objective to you?
• Now, turning to each option available to you, what mark (between 1 and 10) would you give it to fulfil ...

Any systematic weighting exercise requires you to assign scores and probabilities in a way that isn’t entirely scientific and that relies on an element of ‘gut feeling’.

However, this isn’t a weakness of these approaches, as tapping into the emotional part of your psyche i...

Having selected your best option, you need to act upon it. This is what trips up many people. They find it hard – sometimes even impossible – to get started. One way out of such a dilemma is to break down your big decision into a series of micro-decisions.

This is only the...

How can you think outside the box and see that other elusive option?

• One way is to adopt a childlike mindset. As children go through school education, grow up and learn to function as productive adults, one thing they tend to lose is their creative confidence, this p...

Ultimately, what defines a hard decision isn’t so much the decision itself, but how it is perceived by the decision-maker. You might feel that a decision is hard because:

• the stakes, for you, are particularly high;
• two or more options weigh the same in your mind; or

When facing difficult decisions, it is likely that different parts of you might want different things.

When deciding whether to book a pricey holiday, one part of you (prudent) might think that this expense is unreasonable, while another part of you (hedonistic) prefers to make the mos...

Establish whether your team is working towards the same objectives and ask the following key questions:

• What do you think will happen if you do, or do not, match your competitor’s offer?
• If you did decide to match the other offer, what would be the implications for your company...

When faced with a difficult decision, it can be tempting to take the easy road and procrastinate. This attitude illustrates what might be the greatest myth about decision-making: that, faced with two choices, we still have the option to not decide and to do nothing.

In fact, procra...

Even the world’s most famous investor, Warren Buffett, credits some of his best decision-making to a method known as the 10/10/10, meaning: how will I feel about today’s decision in 10 days’ time, vs 10 months, vs 10 years?

Here again, it is about creating more distance between y...

The etymology of the word ‘decision’ provides important insight. It comes from the Latin word caedere meaning ‘to cut off’.

Decisions cut us off from other choices, other opportunities and the possibility of better outcomes. For this reason, the act of deciding ca...

The more you struggle with difficult decisions, the less distance from them you enjoy and the more bogged down you can become.

And yet, psychological distance provides a sense of perspective that is a key component of effective decision-making.

Objectives are the ultimate goals that a decision aims to achieve.

It is important to list your objectives and cross-check how many of them would be satisfied by each decision. Research has shown that our decisions frequently suffer from having too narrow a range of objectives (perhap...

Making decisions under pressure can blur people’s judgment in at least three ways:

• Under stress, we tend to behave as if we are under time pressure even when we’re not. We often have more time than we think.
• Pressure leads people to ...

• In the short term, people experience more regret from ‘errors of commission’ (taking an action that leads to a disappointing outcome).
• In the long term it is actually ‘errors of omission’ that lead to more regret –...