So many of us think efficiency means jumping right in and making a decision. But to be truly effective, we need to be clear on what we are solving for. Rushing can lead you to make a decision based on the wrong factors, which ultimately will lead to regret.

1. I like to be efficient.

Putting off a decision is a decision in and of itself. However, intentionally slowing down to get clear on what you’re solving will speed up your efficacy. You’ll save time later by spending quality time now to avoid having to revisit the decision.

2. I’m too busy; I don’t have time to give to this decision. 

This is the classic example of “losing the forest for the trees.” Our problems sit in a context. A narrow focus may solve the wrong problem, or only partially solve the problem. If your car breaks down unexpectedly and you rush out to buy a new one, are you considering your needs beyond the present?

3. I just need to solve this problem at this moment.

Our important decisions do involve other stakeholders. Avoiding this bigger picture of who else is affected by a decision can, at best, only partially solve the problem, and may exacerbate it.

4. This is my decision alone; I don’t need to involve others.

To better understand and define the limitations of what you think you know, look for contrary examples and evaluate rival explanations. These techniques can prevent “frame blindness” to keep you from seeing what you want to see rather than what may be present.

5. I know I’m right; I just want data or an opinion to confirm my own thinking.

It’s great to rely on your instincts when picking breakfast cereal. But for larger, high-stakes decisions, when we rely on our gut, we are relying upon bias and faulty memory. Important decisions benefit from prying open cognitive space to allow for new information and insight.

6. I trust my gut.

In fact, good decision-making is circular; it needs a feedback loop as we gather information and analyze it and our thinking. At times we need to go back to find the information we’ve glossed over or to gather new information or conduct a different kind of analysis.

7. Decision-making is linear.

When we try to keep all of our smaller decisions in our minds, we end up relying on faulty memory and a distracted mind. Our emotions can also get in the way, leading to biased thinking. Keeping a record is an important part of thinking and analysis; both Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci kept notebooks. We may never be as brilliant or creative as either of these great thinkers, but we can take a page from their notebooks and write things down to create a record of our thinking and our work.

8. I can pull my ideas together well in my head.

While we may want to forge ahead, we can improve our decisions — and our satisfaction — by investing in a little bit of research and confronting assumptions with evidence. Your best friend might love her car, but that doesn’t mean it’s the car for you, particularly if it won’t fit your daughter’s hockey equipment.

9. I have all the information I need. 

Psychologists far and wide, such as Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014920638401000307">have demonstrated</a> that as much as we’d like to believe it, none of us are rational. We all operate through a dirty windshield of bias based on past experiences and feelings.You might think you won’t get taken in by a car dealer, but they are professional salespeople who know how to evoke an emotional response.

10. I can make a rational decision.

Whether it’s how the bed should be made, which diet to follow, or how to divide up your retirement account, there’s always more than one way to get to “yes.” We’ve been conditioned out of listening to other voices, siloed in our information, environment, and social (media) circles. But getting outside your routines and patterns leads you to see things differently.

11. There’s just one way to do this.

Underlying these myths are three common and popular ideas that don’t serve us well: First, as busy people, we don’t need to invest time to make good decisions. Second, we are rational human beings, able to thoughtfully solve thorny and high-stakes problems in our heads. Third, decision-making is personal and doesn’t need to involve anyone else.All three of these assumptions are false and problematic for clear thinking and analysis.

The core problem

A cheetah’s prodigious hunting skill is not due to its speed. Rather, it’s the animal’s ability to decelerate quickly that makes it a fearsome hunter. In decision-making, too, quality thinking benefits from periods of thoughtful deceleration. These calculated pauses empower you to check and challenge your biases, consolidate your knowledge, include others, and enable you to decide whether to pivot and move in a new direction or stay the course before accelerating again.

The Cheetah pause 🐆

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

11 Myths About Decision-Making

Analysis paralysis is the tendency to act only when you are ultra-confident about the chosen solution can result from two psychological mechanisms: the fear of making mistakes and the belief that, choosing a solution now, we miss the chance of finding a much better one.

Analysis paralysis

The fear of making mistakes can have individual (psychological) or organizational causes. The classic individual cause is perfectionism, which leads to lack of productivity, tense climate, micromanagement, and burnout. The organizational cause can come from a culture in which exists a fear of failure, a culture in which failure is analyzed not to see what we can learn from it, but to find and punish the guilty, a culture that punishes action, but not the mistakes made due to inaction, causing a total lack of initiative.

The fear of making mistakes

The second mechanism of analysis paralysis is the reluctance to choose a solution because maybe if we think about it one more day, we will find a much better one.The perfect solution fallacy is called the Nirvana fallacy and it prevents us from seeing the effectiveness of the solutions we have at hand.

The Nirvana fallacy

<ol><li>Pilot: A small qualitative market research followed by the launch of a minimum viable product, an imperfect prototype, can bring more valuable information than any analysis made in front of the computer.</li><li>Give yourself a deadline.: The work expands to fill all the time allotted. The same goes for decisions, we make them as late as possible. And sometimes it is too late when we find out it is too late.</li><li>Define the main goal, a target, a purpose, and decide based on the alignment to this purpose.</li><li>Flip a coin: Not to let luck decide. No. But because when the coin is in the air, we will know what we want to get.</li></ol>

How to counter perfectionism?

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

What is Analysis Paralysis ? and overcoming perfectionism.

The first problem with our persuasion efforts is that we put too much trust in our natural ability to convince and therefore we usually turn up for the meeting totally unprepared.Make a case for preparing thoroughly for a meeting.Jot down your ideas on a piece of paper, try to think what the other will say, try even to rehearse with a friend or in front of a mirror. Writing things down also helps with our mindset.

Why aren’t we as persuasive as we believe ourselves to be?

Our natural choice is to gather many arguments that would get the other to say yes. This should not be our first approach. Before offering arguments in favor of our claim, we need to deal with the reasons for which the other would say no.Understand that reasons to say no have nothing to do with the reasons to say yes.

Prepare for the no, not for the yes

An efficient method is to perform a quick pre-mortem before your interaction.It’s a method devised by a psychology professor, Gary Klein, for identifying the flaws of projects even before starting them.Try to think that you are in the future, the persuasion just failed and you have to find three concrete reasons that led to this. It takes a few minutes and you might be surprised.It will not only make you much prepared for the interaction but more importantly, can give you a trampoline for persuasion.

How do you prepare for no?

Use the Pre-mortem technique for persuasion.

To create a product or a service that is no longer needed, but you keep spending money, time, and effort on other features, hoping that maybe you can rescue it? This thing is known as “throwing good money after bad” and economists call it the “sunk cost effect”.Sometimes, the effect is so strong that people are immune to any explanation, mathematical, financial, or otherwise.

What is sunk cost effect?

Think that you haven’t invested anything in that project so far, that someone gave it to you. Would you continue it? No? Then close it.Don’t seek the advice of someone who was involved in the initial decision. They are as biased as you are. Ask a new person.

How to counter sunk-cost?

The sunk cost fallacy: How to make better decisions?

While working remotely, it is important to have clarity of roles in group decisions.One common solution is to have a small decision making team, with clearly assigned roles, one of the most important being the decision driver, a person who guides the whole process.Do not confuse this role with the person in charge of the final decision, usually the big boss; the decision driver is just the project manager of the decision.

Define Roles

The decision driver should share an initial proposal.The proposal should define the problem, list 2 or 3 options, provide data around those options and give a recommendation. All the data should be mentioned(ideally in a document like google docs for eg) before the team gathers  (virtually and asynchronous).The proposal is not the exclusive work of the decision driver, it is also based on the opinions of others, primarily from those directly involved.

Preparing to take a decision

A silent asynchronous debate takes place where proposals(1 or 2) are shared with the decision making team and other stakeholders. They can then comment, suggest or object the proposals, all in writing and visible to others.

Have a Silent asynchronous debate

The decision team analyzes these contributions and decides.If there are no more objections for the recommended option, the solution can be adopted by tacit agreement, with zero meetings during the whole process.If there are differences of opinion, a first meeting is established, in which the person with the greatest responsibility (in our case, the CEO) leads the discussion towards an agreed solution.The final decision is then communicated transparently, through another detailed document written by the decision driver.

On Decision Day

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

How to make group decisions while working from home?

<ul>
<li>“the leading position is one of support, not authority”</li>
<li>“don’t make someone’s else decisions your decisions”</li>
<li>“I hire people who complete my skill set”</li>
<li>“integrating a new employee into the team is more important than his skills”</li>
<li>“all those affected by a decision must take part in the discussion”</li>
<li>“for a good relationship, the ratio between praise and criticism must be 3 to 1”</li>
<li>“when something goes wrong, I’m not looking for who’s to blame because that’s me”.</li>
</ul>

Simple rules of managers

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

On simple rules - Thinking in Business

We automatically search and take into consideration only information that confirms our point of view.A rooted form of confirmation bias is self-serving bias, meaning the tendency to explain ourselves the good results through our positive nature and the negative results through the hostile context. And vice versa.

About confirmation bias

A study led by Dan Kahan (2017) shows that we know how to identify a mistake in the design of an experiment, when research is about a hand cream (a neutral subject), but not when the experiment confirms the need for greater control of firearms (ias long as we are great supporters of this public policy).

We're biased towards what we like

<ol><li>Actively seek information that contradicts our position. It’s useful to bring to the decision table someone who will play the role of devil’s advocate, same as in group thinking.</li><li>Put neutral questions when asking for advice or doing market research (don't guide respondents)</li><li>Stop looking at beliefs as certainties with possible values 0% or 100% and to start looking at their nuances. Try to give a percentage value to our deep beliefs on which decisions with important consequences are based.</li></ol>

How can you counteract confirmation bias

On the virtue of changing one’s mind (II) - Thinking in Business

<h2>Diagnose problems to get at their root causes. Focus on the what is before deciding what to do about it.</h2><h2></h2><h2></h2><h2>A good diagnosis typically takes between fifteen minutes and an hour, depending on how well it’s done and how complex the issue is. You should speak to people and look at the evidence together to determine the root causes.</h2>

How to make better decisions - diagnose problems

<h2>Studies have shown that a large number of decisions made by top management teams and found that in 70% of cases, the number of alternative solutions they considered is… 1. That's not considering. You need more alternatives to be able to make a good decision.</h2><h2></h2><h2>Instead of looking at alternatives as one versus another, in a mutually exclusive or mindset, look at one and the other in various combinations.</h2>

How to make better decisions - consider more alternatives

The false sense of choice arises from counting a yes-or-no discussion as a decision.A study showed analysing business decisions of a German tech company showed when the board had a shortlist of at least two alternative solutions, the final choice was more successful than in cases when they just debated whether or not to go with one option.

A false sense of choice - yes or no

strategy

Strategy

Decision-making in times of crisis - MSM Romania

Groupthink is the tendency to make wrong decisions in groups where conformity is more important than the need of listening to opposing views and it works like this: everyone seems to agree with the proposal, I am not, but I will not be the only one who has a different opinion.&nbsp;Multiply this by 3 or 4 and you can get a group in which, although many would object, no one speaks because no one speaks.

What can hinder good decisions in groups?

Group decisions - Thinking in Business

The consulting firm Bain &amp; Company designed a model that describes the roles in a group decision and patented it under the acronym RAPID. The letters mean Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide.&nbsp;

11 Myths About Decision-Making

What is Analysis Paralysis ? and overcoming perfectionism.

Use the Pre-mortem technique for persuasion.

The sunk cost fallacy: How to make better decisions?

How to make group decisions while working from home?

Radu Atanasiu