Decision Making is about “HOW” not “What”

“Your Life is a Summation of Your Decisions. Optimize Your Decision Making to Transform Your Life.”

Decision Making Optimization is NOT about “what to” choose but “how to” choose. The good news is that choosing wisely is a skill, which like any other skill can be improved.

In order to improve our decisions, let’s look at how people actually make choices and decisions across diverse fields. The findings show us that even with diverse people in many different situations, they often think about their choices in the same way. They all have their own “self-defeating” thinking styles that can be improved.

As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “I cannot, for want of sufficient premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please, I will tell you how.”

The key here is not to change your preferences, desires or wants but increase your skill in “thinking about” decisions and choices.

Observation of something is different than thinking. Seeing or listening is different than hypothesizing or imagining what “will happen.”

Thinking can be defined as the skill of “filling gaps in evidence.” (Sir Frederick Bartlett)

Michael Posner defined it as “the achievement of a new representation through the performance of mental operations.”

Thinking usually involves some mental effort and can be visual or verbal.

2 types of thought processes: automatic and controlled.

Automatic: Pure association. Something we experience brings an idea to our mind. This comprises most of our thinking.

Controlled: “What if” thinking. We deliberately hypothesize a class of objects or experiences and then view our experiences in terms of these hypothetical possibilities. There is also visual imagination, creation, and scenario building.

Driving a car is automatic. Our responses to stimuli are so “automatic” that we are usually unaware of them. This does not apply when we are learning to drive.

Utilizing automatic thinking in some disciplines can be called intuition. (Expertise based intuitive decision making is discussed in another article.)

Controlled thinking can be viewed as “higher level associations”. Sometimes an original idea can be intuitive and then it is subjected to scientific reasoning – experimentation, observation, or mathematical reasoning.

Is a decision automatic or controlled? Some business executives claim their decisions are “intuitive” but they have “thought through” the alternatives involved quite thoroughly before deciding which “intuition” to choose. Then with chess grand masters their decision making is actually more automatic than one may realize. With their 50,000 hours of experiences, they look at the best move first and can automatically code entire patterns of pieces and know what constitute good and bad moves from these patterns. They have immediate visual-perceptive processes rather than the subsequent logical-deductive thinking processes. Automatic.

Since we aren’t all grand masters playing a chess match, rather we are people in real life making decisions, our automatic ways about choice situations can systematically lead us to make poorer choices than we would by thinking in a more controlled manner about our decisions.

The quality of a decision cannot be determined solely by its outcome. Rationality is a very important part of the decision making quality. 3 criteria for a rational choice:

The decision maker’s current assets. Current state – physiological, mental, financial, psychological, etc.

The possible consequences of the choice.

Uncertainty which is almost always a factor. We use the basic rules of probability theory.

The past is over and cannot be changed but we often let it influence our futures in an irrational manner. ex. making a decision based on a choice that led to a good outcome in the past in similar circumstances.