How to make Good Decisions.
Making a good decision is an art. If you think you don’t make good decisions or that you have not been making the best ones lately, do not be alarmed. It is not a skill we are born with. It is a learned behavior, though some of us are better at it than others.
How you arrived at a cause of action or in-action determines the quality of said behavior. As such, the quality of our decision is directly dependent on our decision-making process. Therefore, it is crucial how you settled on buying that car, or on whether or not to proceed with that project. The process for making good decisions require a certain mind-set and the ability to recognize the necessary factors to take into consideration. We will address these as well as some of the challenges you may encounter while in this process.
In the art deciding, there is one critical rule of thumb; learn to control your emotions. Following this will significantly raise the odds that your decisions are the best given your particular sets of circumstances. That said, intuition can play a huge role in good decision making. But, there is a caveat. We will touch more upon this later.
Different Decision-Making Processes
Evolution has allowed us to develop different ways we process information. The fastest and most common of these is emotional. But it is also the least reliable. Then there is our intuitive process, which seems similar to our emotional process, but is very different. This process is also fast, and oftentimes imperceptible and may seem counter intuitive. It has a high reliability rate if certain other factors which we will discuss later are in place. And there is concrete or critical thinking. It is the hardest, slowest, but the most reliable way we process. Each of these processes have their strengths and weaknesses. Let us briefly look at each.
The Emotional Process:
We all engage in this method of processing information and decision making. For some of us, it is the only way we know how to. We have all heard the expression, “if it feels good, it is good.” Listen to this story I was told when I lived out in Los Angeles. Her name was Sersi. She was a single mom. One day she had to go run some errands and pick up some grocery. So, she and her three little children jumped into their brown Dodge Ram SUV because she could not leave them at home by themselves. While in traffic, a driver in another vehicle came out of nowhere and cut in-front of them. Sersi was furious! And she, not letting this act of injustice go unanswered, was determined to cut right back in-front of the assailant to even the score. But the driver in the other vehicle, as if wanting to maintaining the upper hand, started to speed up. Sersi was down for a fight. She too stepped on the gas! The high-speed chase began. Down the 405 they went. A few moments later, the police showed up and pulled them both over. The officer notified Sersi that the driver of the other vehicle had called them to report that she was being chased by someone on the freeway and that she had no idea why. In her indignation, Sersi told the officer what happened, how the other driver without asking, cut right in-front of her, and that she, Sersi, was only trying to make things right. She said the officer listened as she narrated her side of the story. After she was done the police officer, said, “Ma’am, what if you crashed your car or the other driver had a gun? Don’t you care that your children are in the car with you?” Even when Sersi was narrating this event, somehow, she still believed that her actions were justified and correct. That the other driver should not have cut her off. Somehow the fact that her little children were in the car with her, and the possibilities that entailed did not seem to register. Now, maybe you have not heard or engaged in something this dramatic, but all of us at some point have given the middle finger or cursed at someone who had cut us off in traffic before we remembered that our child was in the car with us. Sersi’s decision and similar things we do, are all emotional. In other words, our limbic system is at play directing our behavior.
In this process, we respond to things without thinking them through, or considering their consequences or other available options. We do what feels right in the moment. Our decisions are instant and automatic. However, these decisions are generally not the best, because the process through which we arrived at them is unreliable. The way we feel about a thing fluctuates. And more so, emotions make being objective difficult and obscure the facts. Hence decisions made through this process is at best a coin toss, or worst erratic. On the flip side, if you were famished and were ushered into a room with a table set with prime beef fillet mignon seasoned and cooked to perfection, served with finest merlot was set before you, I believe it will pay you to let your limbic system take absolute control.
The Concrete/Critical Thinking Process:
This is the hardest of our three modes of processing information. It is the slowest but also our most reliable. This form of processing takes into consideration available verifiable facts. It rigorously applies the rules of logic, separating accidents from essence, to arrive at conclusions that necessarily or probably follow from the available premises. For instance; in this age-old syllogism: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. The conclusion, Socrates is mortal, follows necessarily from the premises. This is because everything in the class of what is called Men, share the quality of Mortality. And if Socrates is a Man, therefore, he necessarily shares in the quality of Mortality that all in the class of what is referred to as Men participate in. However, if the statement is, “It rained last night, therefore it is wet outside”, the necessity of rain the previous night, make the conclusion, “it is wet outside”, a possibility, and not a necessity. Because it being wet outside, can also be because we have a broken fire hydrant.
Critical thinking considers hard or concrete facts and draws conclusions from them. It is purely cerebral. It is also our slowest form of thinking, simply because sometimes the necessary facts may not be immediately obvious, or some other situation may obscure those facts, for instance, if you ask one lover if their partner committed a crime. Passion may blind or obscure the perception of the lover being questioned. Hence too, the response may be colored by passion. Otherwise, this form of thinking takes only the facts into consideration and approaches the situation methodically and arrives at a conclusion systematically. These conclusions may not always be the best or necessarily correct for the situation, but their results follow from the available facts, hence making those results and the following decisions reliable.
Intuition Process:
This is what we generally refer to as a hunch, and it is can be very reliable, but there is a caveat; you must have the requisite experience or knowledge in the given area. For instance, a woman that have nursed several children sees a baby squirm and almost instantly says, “she is hungry or he needs a diaper change.” She seems to implicitly understand what the baby needs. It is also like when you walk into a negotiation meeting and immediately decide to change the strategy you and your team decided on, because you’ve read the temperature of room and your experience tells you that your prearranged strategy will not work. It is also when a doctor that has been practicing for a considerable number of years is sometimes able to diagnose a patient by merely looking at them. Now, without the requisite experience, it still is possible to have these hunches, but am not sure what to call those. Revelations, premonitions? So, with the requisite experience or knowledge, your intuition may tell you that this business proposal will not work, though you have not gone over the paper work, but have only listened to the guy making the pitch for three minutes, and your decision will be spot on. This form of processing has a high reliability rate because it is based on experience and or knowledge, albeit no apparent deductive and inductive process went into the deliberation which gave rise to the decision.
However, even with the experience and knowledge, it pays to do the due diligence of attending the facts. This will make your intuition clearer.
How then can we make decisions that are not emotionally driven when we do not have the requisite experience or knowledge?
Process Accountability:
Good decisions require clarity of purpose; why you want what you want, and firm resolution to follow through. But sometimes our emotions get in the way. To avoid this, it helps to have written down check marks to weigh your choices against so that your decision is in line with your goal.
The story goes that Google’s version of skunkworks, simply known as ‘X’ is tasked with identifying and piloting new ideas that Google should embark on. The team has someone whose primary responsibility is to quickly assess an idea for viability and make recommendations. The person in that position is called a Rapid Evaluator. The core questions the evaluator asks is, what will make this project unreasonable or non-viable?
The ‘X’ team had one such project. It was called Foghorn. The idea was to turn seawater into fuel. (If you are interested in the details, click here)[1]. In summary; fossil fuel accounts for nearly 97% of transportation-related greenhouse gas. Foghorn aimed to reduce those emissions by pulling carbon and hydrogen from the sea to create a carbon-neutral fuel. However, for this fuel to be a viable alternative to gasoline, it needed to be cost-competitive, that is; cost less than $5 to produce a gallon. The project encountered a major challenge. Cost. It was very expensive to pump the amount of required seawater also, the process for creating hydrogen was not cost efficient. Further investigation revealed that though it would be possible for the team to figure out a cheaper way to manufacture the fuel, it would, however, involve considerable amounts of time and money till that viable alternative is found.
Besides these financial hurdles, the project seemed to be going great. The teams Rapid Evaluator, who’s idea the project was, now had to evaluate and decide to recommend whether the project should continue or not. Counter intuitively, she recommended the project be terminated; her reason being that due to the costs alone, Foghorn will not be a viable project to pursue, at least, not at the moment. Though, yes, they will be able to figure out a cheaper way to generate the required materials, but to spend the amount of time and money required before that will happen will not be fiscally responsible nor justifiable. When asked how she was able to recommend the termination of ‘her own project’ her response was simple. The kill signal indicated very strongly that it was non-viable. In other words, the project met a criterion that equaled its termination. Before commencing the project, she had set certain criteria for evaluating the project’s viability. She had process accountability.
Your process accountability is a list of benchmarks, variables to consider, and how you will evaluate each of them to see if they are met. Part of your process accountability is to have a non-negotiable, your kill signal. That is, what will be your conclusive indication that the thing should not be done. What your non-negotiable is will reveal a lot about you and the problem. For instance, I want to get married and my benchmarks are: she must be 5’9”, no more than 135Ibs, huge ass and ginormous boobs, long flowing horse’s mane for hair. And my non-negotiable is, if sex with her feels like washing my hands with gloves on, then the relationship is not worth pursuing. A critical look at my benchmarks and non-negotiable reveals a set of ephemerals on which a potential lifelong decision is going to be based. If you want to be judgmental, you can also say that I am shallow. But that’s not the point. Now pay attention here. This is not a judgement on this process accountability or on the non-negotiable. Far from it. It is an objective look at the decision variables, that is, what I am taking into consideration while making this particular decision. A further look at this decision’s variables also reveals that, if say I meet a lady that checks off all the boxes, and sex with her is like listening to angels sing while sipping on Henney on the rocks, and smoking a Cuban cigar rolled on a mulatto woman’s thigh, the probability that I will leave her for another woman when that figure begins to sag, the boobs and ass begin to droop, and the sex isn’t as great any more, maybe because we now have 3 little banshees, is significant high. Now whether I am even aware of the transitory nature of the factors leading to my decision and their possible implications is another conversation. How then do we determine what are the right variables to consider? Before we determine those, first we need the requisite mind set.
[1] https://x.company/projects/foghorn/
Values:
To help you develop the requisite mindset for better decision-making skills, as honestly as possible, write down your answers to the following questions: (a) What type of man/woman do I want to be? (b) What values do I currently possess that are align with the kind of person I want to be? (b) What kind of values do I need to develop to be that person I want to be? (c) What are my guiding principles (that is, what concrete behaviors should I have /develop to live out my values)? (d) Which of my values are non-negotiable, the ones I can’t compromise on and why? Your responses to these four questions will evolve over time. But being constantly aware of your responses will put you in the frame of mind required for you to begin to be aware of the things that matter most to you, which are the variables you need to consider as you make any important decision. Human reality however being what it is, we sometimes encounter obstacles to good decisions, even when we have all the right techniques and tools. To better manage those obstacles, let us consider what they are.
Obstacles to making Good Decisions.
We have all experienced situations where we know that things are not going quite right, or that we have made a mistake, yet we hang-in there saying to ourselves that things will change, or that we can fix it, or we are not quitters. Any of this familiar? I know, I did the same thing for several years before I finally pulled the plug on the priesthood. The term that has been coined for this behavior is Escalation of Commitment.[1]
What is Escalation of Commitment?
This is when you keep investing time, energy and resources into a cause you know is lost. You realize you have made a mistake, but you continue to invest into the decision because you are personally identified with it. Why would anyone do this we may ask? Good question. There are several reasons why. Consensus is that the primary one is our emotion, but before that, the very first I believe is: 1. Hope: we have some hope, unfounded as it may be, that the thing might still work. So, we continue to throw resources at it, hoping the tide will turn, though all of the evidence suggests the contrary. 2. Egos and emotions: we have become personally identified with whatever the thing is. We want to prove something to ourselves, to someone or to the world. We identify a mistake, or the fact that we were wrong with our sense of self. We believe admitting error will mean we are a mistake, that our person is wrong, that it will reflect negatively on our ego and image. 3. Sunk Cost: This is the belief that we have invested so much, therefore we have to get something in return, no matter how little. 4. Anticipated Return: we wonder; what if we cut our losses, or let go, only for us to watch that thing bloom like we expected somewhere else? That voice inside our heads that say, “you can’t quit now”; “you are a quitter”; “what if…?” You believe you are the one to change the situation for the better. 5. Fear: “what if I let this go and nothing better happens?” “What if I admit I made a mistake and I am fired?” What if we admit we were wrong and they laugh at us? What if this is the best I’ll ever have (after all, a bird at hand is worth two, a thousand in the bush)?
These are some of the challenges we will encounter on our way to making decisions. And it is typically not easy to follow through, especially when our emotions become involved. Now that we know these, let us look at some of the variables we need to consider, that will also help us overcome these obstacles.
Making Good Decisions.
Amat victoria curam (victory loves preparation), the saying goes. How can we better prepare ourselves so that we can raise our odds of making better decisions than we did last time? I have created a generic check list that you can modify to suit your particular purpose.
Decision making checklist.
-
- What do I want? (Be very specific)
- How do I know that am getting what I bargained for?
- What is my non-negotiable? (what will be your sign to pull the plug? If … happens, then…)
- What will be your signs to go all in? (If …, then I will….)
- Are there people, situations, things, places I need to stay away from to help me make the right decision?
- Do I need to change anything in my current state (Types of things am currently involved in)?
- Sometimes: it helps to separate the decision from the decision maker. Having an accountable other, someone that can help you make the call if need be. It has to be someone you respect. They will hold you accountable and help you enforce your non-negotiable. (this is only if you think you are too close to the situation or will be too emotional about the decision)
However, you ought to hold yourself accountable and ultimately responsible. Your decisions do not have to lead to success, but you have to do what you diligently and possibly can. If it fails, learn and pivot, failure is your fulcrum.
Failure vs Stepping Stones.
Your project, though it is your idea, is not you. When making decisions therefore, remove your ego from it and do not be personally attached to the outcome of your decisions. The project, the thing or person you are deciding about is simply that, an item. Treat it as such. When you make a mistake, admit it. Then take some time to learn how you contributed to that outcome. That way you turn an apparent misfortune into a fortunate event.
Part of being human is doing things that will fail, either due to ignorance, culpable or otherwise, or due to other human factors; not being able to control the actions of those around you, or yet again, due to other exigent circumstances; simply not being able to plan for and foresee every possible permutation of things that can happen or go wrong. And finally, you cannot guarantee that everything or anything will go as planned. I lost a friend in a plane crash. He came to visit when I was living in Los Angeles. We had a great time. I took him back to his hotel room. He boarded the plane the following day to head back home to his newly wed wife and on-coming baby, only for the plane to crash after only 57 minutes in the air. There was nothing he could have done differently. Failure is a human inevitability. It is normal. Do we give up at the first sign of what seems like a non-negotiable? No. Part of making good decisions are discernment and prudent judgement, because ego, blindness and grit somethings can look the same.
It is easy to mistake blindness or egotism for grit. A simple distinction will be: grit has genuine purpose behind it and it heads in the right direction. Blindness on the other hand may have right purpose, but it heads down the wrong path because it is unguided. Then ego driven decisions have both purpose and right direction, but all for the wrong reasons. Grit is an admirable quality which definitely leads to success. Therefore, as your nose is to the grind and you are pushing forward, it helps to sometimes raise your head, if possible climb the highest peak around you (evaluate-ask people you respect if you have to) look around. See if you are on course. Then continue or recalibrate. If you are on a roll, these check-ins may feel like a waste of time, but they are well worth it.
Sometimes making a good decision will be the hardest and scariest thing you need to do. And that is understandable. If, however, we learn to focus on the big picture, on our responsibility towards others, the greater good, it will help us with follow through. If you believe and know that what you currently possess is not the best of what you can have, it is in your best interest to let the current situation go and search for that which is worth finding. You have to believe that you will find it. She that seeks finds.
[1]Staw, B. (1996). The escalation of commitment: An update and appraisal. In Z. Shapira (Ed.), Organizational Decision Making (Cambridge Series on Judgment and Decision Making, pp. 191-215). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511584169.011
Michael.