The power of decision making

Shelter Chieza Change Management
Decision making for managers is never an easy process. Regardless of the years of experience you have accumulated in a portfolio, you can never claim to be 100 percent accurate in decision-making.
Big decisions like firing an employee, or concluding a partnership with a certain entity or moving out of a partnership or selling a stake within an entity can wreak emotional havoc on a manager. Sometimes managers lose sleep over big decision making issues.

I have discovered the power of summarising as you make decisions. If you intend to make a decision on who to partner in a project, limit your key expectations to about 5.

It’s okay to have adequate information because it helps you make better decisions. You can actually cross the normal threshold and reach a stage where you have too much information.

At some point, I was trying to make a drastic career shift. I did thorough research to the point where I had more information than what I needed.

I had too many facts and opinions in front of me. A change like this one had to be made wisely because some decisions in life are just irreversible.

You see, making sound decisions is a skill set that takes time to develop like any other.

All leaders and managers are not created equal when it comes to the competency of their decision skills. Nothing will test your leadership prowess more than your ability to make decisions.

I am sure most people have made some regrettable decisions at some point in their lives. The initial exchange of poor decision making is the bad choice which leads to bad decisions.

In many cases, poor leaders cover a bad decision with another bad choice and the cycle goes on -leadership and decision making are intricately woven.

The leaders that make it are the ones that manage to rise after a fall. They are normally identified by their ability to consistently make sound decisions that add value to their company.

It is sad when a fresh executive who has been making pretty good and accurate decisions gets it wrong on one decision.

The decisions one makes in the boardroom should not be based on gut instinct because it does not work all the time.

It should be based on a skill taught and mastered over time. Such skills like information and knowledge management are useful in directing one to make sound decisions..

Gut instincts are often prone to oversight, misinformation, misunderstanding, manipulation, impulsivity or some other negative influencing factor.

Managers often have to deal with volumes and volumes of information. Sifting through the information is a time consuming process.

You must know and understand the hierarchy of the knowledge and information you have. Study and learn to develop a qualitative and quantitative filtering mechanism for your decision making process.

A recent research at Princeton University concluded that the way our minds work springs from the systematic errors that we all make all the time, without realising them.

It was discovered that there is the deliberate, logical part of your mind that is capable of analysing a problem and coming up with a rational answer.

This is the part of the human mind that we are aware of which has expertise in solving problems, but it is slow and extremely lazy.

Even the act of walking is enough to occupy most of your attentive mind. To prove this, try to solve a tricky problem while walking, you will most likely stop because your attentive mind cannot attend to both tasks at the same time.

The human being naturally develops gut instincts. These are experiential and emotional filters that may often have no hard analytical support.

We also have raw data which contains disparate facts, random statistics, and is often difficult to use as a basis for decision making.

Information is more complete whereas knowledge is information that has been refined by analysis such that it has been assimilated and can be actionable.

If I was to offer you a gift of your favourite perfume, 50ml and give you an option of 100ml tomorrow, what would you take?

The majority would take what is offered right now because we never know what tomorrow will be like.

This is strongly supported by demonstrations such as overeating and smoking, texting and driving.

The human mind tends to look for information that confirms what we already know. That is why we tend to buy newspapers that agree with our views. This explains the reason why we feel the pain of a loss much more than we feel the pleasure of a gain. This is loss aversion, and its cumulative effect can be catastrophic.

Till next week, may God richly bless you.