Decision Making

We all are living a very fast life. Every second knowingly or unknowingly we are making a decision, that can be right or wrong which we may never know about it.

Everyone of us has some principles in our life. These principles are one of the most influencing factors or may be the only factor in our Decision making. The stronger and deeper the principles, the more effective decision can be made. Ofcourse, it also needs the knowledge about what the problem is and its solution, its environment while making a decision.

All people whether successful or unsuccessful operates by principles that help them to make a decision. Without principles, you would be forced to react to situation that come to you without considering what you value the most and how to make choice to get what you want. This would prevent you from making the most of your life. Principles are reservoir of personal wisdom built by you on foundation of advices, experiences and reflection as you have grown that can be used to make decision moving forward.

Once there was a group of children playing near two railway tracks, one still in use while the other disused. Only one child played on the disused track, the rest on the operational track. Now imagine, a train is coming and you are just beside the track interchange. You can make the train change its course to the disused track and save most of the kids. However, that would also mean the lone child playing by the disused track would be sacrificed or would you rather let the train go its way?

Lets take a pause to think and test your principle or what kind of decision you would make.

Most people might choose to divert the course of train and sacrifice only one child. You might think the same way, may be even I thought exactly the same way initially because to save most of the children at the expense of one child was rational decision most people would make, morally and emotionally. But, have you ever thought that the child playing on disused track had in fact made the right decision to play at the safe place!

Nevertheless, he had to be sacrificed because of his ignorant friends who chose to play where the danger was.  This kind of dilemma happening around us everyday in office, community, politics and especially in a democratic society, the minority is often sacrificed for the interest of the majority, no matter how foolish or ignorant the majority are and how forsighted and knowledgeable the minority are. The child who chooses not to play with rest on the operational track was sidelined, and in the case he was sacrificed, no one would shed a tear for him.

The great critic Leo Velski Julian who told the story said he would not try to change the course of the train because he believed that the kids playing on the operational track should have known very well that track was still in use and that they should ran away if they heard the train’s sirens. If the train was diverted that lone child would definitely die because he never thought the train would come over to that track. Moreover, the track was in use probably because it was not safe. If the train was diverted to the track, we could put lives of all passengers on board at stake! And in your attempt to save few kids by sacrificing one child, you might end up sacrificing hundreds of people to save these few kids.

While we are all aware that life is full of tough decisions that needs to be made, we may not realize that hasty decisions may not always be the right one.

Remember that what’s right isn’t always popular… And what’s popular isn’t always right.

ADVICE + HARDWORK + EXPERIENCE

The world is becoming complex day by day. We many a times feel insecure as to whether I would have mental power to make good decision and how could I possibly succeed in this 21^st century. You can get away with this in life by these three task.

• Advice from mentor
• Hard work or actions on the advice
• You experience of your action

It is very important to have mentor in your life whose advice you can take as gospel. Mentor can be any one like head of state, philosopher humanitarians, business titans who may have wrote down all their wisdom. They may be of any age group, living or dead, in person to remote.

Next comes is Hardworking. It’s time to put action on the advice taken from the mentors.

After applying or misapplying good advice and/or properly applying bad advice, you learn to focus more on part of reflecting of your experiences. Reflection is like adding rocket fuel to your equation, it enable you to get so much more leverage out of every bit of wisdom offered, and eventually helps you show value to mentors by sharing insights about how their advice played out in the field.

Scientific Approach: Rational Decision making approach

1. The first decision making lesson should be to ask yourself if you really have a problem to solve or a decision to make.
2. Gathering information: What is relevant and what is not relevant to the decision? What do you need to know before you can make a decision or that will help you make the right one?
3. Analyzing the situation: What alternative courses of action may be available to you? What different interpretation of the data may be possible?
4. Developing options: Generate several possible options. Be creative and Positive.
5. Evaluating alternatives:- What criteria should you use to evaluate? Evaluate for feasibility, acceptability and desirability. Which alternative will best achieve your objectives?
6. Selecting a preferred alternative: Explore the provisional preferred alternative for future possible adverse consequence. What problems might it create? What is the risk of making this decision?
7. Acting on the decision: Put a plan in place to implement the decision. Have you allocated resources to implement? Is the decision accepted and supported by colleagues? Are they committed to making the decision work?

The main strength of above approach is that it provides structure and discipline to the decision making process. It helps ensure we consider the full range of factors relating to a decision in a logical and comprehensive manner.

Judgment, principles, experience and knowledge with complete and sufficient information all come together when making decisions.

Being Positive:

There is a disease epidemic sweeping through the country and without medicine 600,000 people will die. You have to choose one of the two medicine to make.

If you chose medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose medicine B, there will be 1/3^rd chance of saving 600,000 people and 2/3^rd of saving no one. Which medicine do you choose?

Most people would go with A, the less risky bet, because we’re risk averse when the choice is framed as a gain as in saving people. But what if we framed the question a little differently in the 2^nd scenario.

If you choose medicine A, 400,000 people will die. If you choose medicine B, there is a 1/3 chances of saving 600,000 people and 2/3 of saving no one. Which medicine do you choose?

Suddenly, with the glass-half-empty wording, medicine A seems like a less palatable option. Although the scenario are exactly the same, people become more risk-seeing in the second scenario, wen medicine A is framed as a loss of life and go with medicine B. The researched asked this question to three different groups of students – Americans learning Japanese, Koreans learning English and Americans learning french – and in each case the risk framing effect disappeared when students had to think in their foreign language. They acted rationally. It is important that emotional aspect gets filtered out.