The decisions we make shape our lives. If you have to make a choice and you don’t make one, that in itself is a decision. One of the best things we can do to improve our batting average when it comes to decision making is simply to make more decisions. Below you will find several methods to pick and choose from to help you make better decisions.
Dale Carnegie – How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
In his classic self-help book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
First: Get all the facts. To quote Dean Hawkes of Columbia University, “half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.” You need to define the problem, determine the cause of the problem, and come up with a list of all the possible solutions you can think of.
Second. Carefully weigh all of the facts and then come to a decision. Ask yourself: “What is the best solution?”
Third. Once a decision is carefully reached, act! Get busy carrying out your decision–and dismiss all anxiety about the outcome.
Beware of Factors Which Can Distort or Filter Your Perception
Garth Sundem explains in “Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life” that the power of suggestion can distort our so-called objectivity. “Imagine”, he says, “if I handed you a cup of hot coffee and then asked your opinion about a person whom you had recently met; now suppose I instead handed you a cup of ice-cold soda. Experiments show that your opinion of this person would be different because you have been primed to feel warmth or coldness”.
Other factors which can distort how we analyze the data that will lead to our decisions are the following:
- Framing: How you present the data is as important as the data itself.
- Impact bias: Overestimation of possible outcomes. That is, people seem to think that if the worse scenario occurs it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it.
- Confirmation bias or Selective Perception: Recognizing only data that supports your hypothesis. Seeing only what you want to see.
- Rosy retrospection: You forget the bad elements of a past experience, and remember the good. This is “integral to the repeated experience of family Christmas”, says Professor Sundem.
- Loss aversion: By taking a certain course of action we stand to gain more than we would lose, but our fear of loss pushes us to make a different choice.
Grid Analysis (or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory)
Grid Analysis is a useful technique to use for making a decision. It is particularly useful when you have a number of good alternatives to choose from, and many different factors to consider. The technique works by getting you to list your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. Then follow these steps:
First. Decide on the relative importance of the factors. The relative importance can be shown as numbers from, say, 0 to 5, where 0 means that the factor is absolutely unimportant in the final decision, and 5 means that it’s very important. For example, the factors that will influence your decision on what car to buy might be the following: cost, environmental friendliness, attractiveness, trunk size, and safety. You might assign the following scores to each factor in terms of relative importance:
- Cost: 5 (the cost is very important to you)
- Environmental Friendliness: 4 (this is also pretty important)
- Attractiveness: 3 (somewhat important)
- Trunk size:2 (not very important)
- Safety: 5 (also very important, as important as cost)
Second. The next step is to work your way down the columns of your table, scoring each option for each of the factors that will contribute to your decision. Score each option from 0 (poor) to 5 (very good) for each of the factors. For example, if one of your options is a Prius, it might score as follows
- 3 for the cost (it’s reasonably priced)
- 5 for environmental friendliness (it’s very energy efficient)
- 2 for attractiveness (this is not a very attractive car)
- 3 for trunk size (it’s a decent-sized trunk)
- 4 for safety (let’s assume it’s a safe car)
Third. Now multiply the relative importance of each of the factors with the score you gave to each of the options for that factor. So again, for the Prius:
- Cost: 5 times 3= 15
- Environmental Friendliness: 4 times 5 = 20
- Attractiveness: 3 times 2 = 6
- Trunk size: 2 times 3 = 6
- Safety: 5 times 4 = 20
The total score for the Prius is 67 (15 + 20 + 6 + 6 + 20). The option with the highest score is your best option. Use this grid from Mind Tools to help you get started: free grid analysis worksheet.
Another option is to create a “Decision Tree”. To learn how to create a decision tree, go here.
The Four-Step Natural Brilliance Model
In his book, Natural Brilliance
First. Release, that is, drain all stress from your body and mind. A relaxed body and mind promotes the optimal state for learning: relaxed awareness. Being stressed and tense makes us narrow our focus and therefore reduces the number of options we can come up with to solve the problem.
Second. Notice; become aware of what is going on around you and within you. By combining steps one and two, release and notice, you achieve a state of relaxed alertness. With relaxed alertness you increase the amount of information that you have about the situation and are better able to come up with a rich set of options to choose from.
Third. Respond: take action. Anything that you do will have an effect, which means that by acting you will have more feedback with which to work. By acting you will either have more information on what works, or you will have more information on what doesn’t work. In either case, movement will provide you with real and immediate feedback.
Fourth. Witness by pretending to sit across from yourself and take on the perspective of a wise and trusted counselor. Have a conversation with yourself about the results you got when you acted. Decide how to best work with the feedback you received from your action so that you can modify your response and act once again. Continue following these four steps until you reach the desired outcome.
Visualize Your Ideal Outcome
This is an exercise taken from John Harricharan’s book “Power Pause.” It takes three minutes – one minute to think about what you want to happen… one minute to think about how good you’ll feel when it does happen… and one minute to calm yourself down by thinking about what you are already grateful for in your life. This exercise will help put you in the right frame of mind to make the best decision at any given moment in time.
In addition, once you visualize the ideal outcome you can begin to use reverse engineering: what had to happen just before you reached the ideal outcome? What happened before that? And before that? In this way you can create a trail that will hopefully lead you toward the outcome you visualized.
Six Thinking Hats – Looking at a Decision from Several Points of View
I already mentioned Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” in my “30 Ways to be More Creative” post, but it’s worth mentioning here as well. Basically, it involves looking at a problem from may different perspectives.
White Hat: With this thinking hat, you gather all of the information that you possibly can about your subject matter. Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.
Red Hat:Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Ask: “What do I feel I should do?”; “What are my emotions telling me to do?”; and “What does my intuition say about this?”
Black Hat: Look at things pessimistically, thinking of everything that could go wrong. Try to see why ideas and approaches might not work. This highlights weaknesses in possible courses of action that need to be addressed. It allows you to eliminate them, alter your approach, or prepare contingency plans in case problems should arise.
Yellow Hat: When wearing the yellow hat you should think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it, and spot the opportunities that arise from it.
Green Hat: The Green Hat stands for creativity. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem.
Blue Hat: The Blue Hat stands for process control.
Sometimes the Best Decision is to Wait-and-See
When I was in law school my Constitutional Law professor told us the “Tale of Nasrudin” to illustrate the point that sometimes the best decision is to wait-and-see. Here it is:
Nasrudin was caught in the act and sentenced to die. When hauled before the king, Nasrudin said the following to him: “I am the greatest teacher in your kingdom; so skilled am I that I could even teach your favorite horse to sing, given a year to work on it.”
The king was amused, and said: “Very well then, move into the stable immediately, and if the horse isn’t singing a year from now, you’ll be killed then.”
As he was returning to his cell to pick up his rags and move to the stable his cellmate said to him: “That was stupid. You can’t teach that horse to sing!”
Nasrudin responded: “Not at all. I have a year now that I didn’t have before. And a lot of things can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die. And, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing.”
Conclusion
There are many different models and procedures you can use to make decisions. Pick one, or a combination of them, and move forward with your life by making decisions. To quote Aneurin Bevan, “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.”
How do you make decisions?
(“Her Magic Eight Ball”; courtesy of T v k)
Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe by RSS or e-mail and you’ll always know when I publish something new. If you’d like information on how RSS works, go here. You can also follow me on Twitter.
