Decision Quality Blog

Decision making is a distinctly human activity: it is more than an instinctive “stimulus/response.”  Decisions aren’t found under a rock.  They are the result of cognitive processes that we can control.  They are what make us human. Because we are human, and because decision making is a distinctly human activity, decision making is subject to all manner of pitfalls, errors, traps and flaws. 

Most of us are not as good at decision making as we think we are or would like to be. There are many reasons why this is true.  Here are some.

• While we are experienced decision makers, we are not necessarily skilled in the sense that we have not thought about and internalized processes that lead reliably to high quality choices.
• We are much more easily influenced than we care to admit: by people, by word choices, by events, and by our own emotions.
• We are driven by psychological forces most of us don’t really understand: We were not evolved in modern industrialized, information-overloaded, choice-rich environments.
• We are wired to take mental short cuts.  It’s how we go through without having to make decisions about everything that we need to do.  Those mental short cuts can and do work against us causing us to make low quality decisions (again, far more often than we want to believe).
• We hate having to make trade-offs.
• We are evolved to adapt to our circumstances and to revisionist thinking,  We quickly learn to live with the consequences and outcomes of our decisions and retrofit our stories so that we can be right.

Despite everything we appear to have going against us, most of us manage to be highly functional and successful in life: We can say with confidence that we must be good decision makers judging by the outcomes we’re associated with.  Either that or we just got lucky (or a bit of both).

So why try to get better?  Why spend time and energy learning how to make higher quality decisions (and what does that mean anyway)?  After all, it’s not like we wake up in the morning thinking we need to be better decision makers?

We have over the years asked thousands of executives and leaders two simple and related questions:

• Are you a good decision maker (and how do you know)?
• Are “we” (meaning the group that person is part of) good decision makers?

As you might expect, the most frequently occurring answer to the first question is, “It depends.”  The answer to the second question is most consistently, “No.”

Why all this matters can be summed up in an oft quoted statistic from a now-retired professor named Paul Nutt who after years of research concluded that more than 50% of all decisions in business are unsuccessful.  Some of us think he’s a wild-eyed optimist.

Why Decisions Fail

Paul C Nutt. Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2002, Paperback, 332 pages, $12.41

While the dynamics of making decisions by yourself and making decisions with other people are different in many ways, they are similar in many ways as well.  Particularly where the decision is complicated—meaning difficult trade-offs, lack of clarity about the real problem, lots of uncertainty, long feedback loops, significant consequences associated with the outcomes—we can increase our confidence that we’re making a high quality choice by improving the quality of the decision process we use.  Steps that lead to decision quality include the following:

• Take time to explore the problem.  Words matter.  You’ll get new insights about the problem and later see a better set of alternatives by taking care in how you frame the problem.
• Give yourself good alternatives.  As consumers we usually face way too many choices.  In that case, quality may come from limiting alternatives.  In business, often the opposite is true: We rush to solution.  So time spent thinking about alternatives THE RIGHT WAY is important.
• Be smart about how you gather information.  As is true about choices, it is possible to have too much and too little information . . . and in the end it is not possible to know everything you might like to know.  Focus your information on gathering on what is important.  Focus on what could go wrong and what that means to your decision.
• Identify clear values and not too many of them.  Too many trade-offs is as problematic as too many choices and too much information.  The opposite is also true.

As you would expect, there are many ways to go about building quality into each of those steps.  Fortunately, for most decisions, the principles, methods, and tools you need are simple, easy to understand and master, and easy to use in both individual and group decision settings.

For more on making quality decisions visit these links: