Our decisions determine our results. A key aspect of improving our decision making, is to follow a clearly defined process, that lays adequate importance to each step involved in our coming to decisions. By improving our decision making process, we can make better decisions, helping ultimately to better results and outcomes.
Advice from Masters – Quotes & Tips on Decision Making
Decision Making Process
What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge.
Annie Duke – Author – Thinking in Bets
Success emerges from the quality of the decisions we make and the quantity of luck we receive. We can’t control luck. But we can control the way we make choices.
Tripwires: One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one.
Process vs analysis: When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic.
Pros & Cons: The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed.
Opportunity Cost: What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?
WRAP process: Widen Your Options | Reality-Test Your Assumptions | Attain Distance Before Deciding. | Prepare to Be Wrong.
Chip Health – Author – Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
Rapid Decisions
When you’re making rapid decisions, you will get things wrong from time to time. The idea, however, is that over time, you gain more than you lose. And speed is important, because opportunities come and go quickly.
Colin Powell, a former U.S. Secretary of State, talks about making decisions using the “40-70” rule.16 He notes that if you have less than 40 percent of the information, you will likely make a wrong decision, while if you wait for more than 70 percent of the information, too often it will be too late and your decision will not matter. We need to make decisions quickly—and often with incomplete data.
Sunil Saxena – Author – Massive Action equals Massive Results
7 Steps Of Effective Decision Making
Decision making is the process of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information, and assessing resolutions.
Using a step-by-step decision-making process can help you make more deliberate, thoughtful decisions by organizing relevant information and defining alternatives. The approach increase the changes that you will choose the most satisfying alternative possible.
- Identify The Decision
- Gather Information
- Identify Alternatives
- Weigh The Evidence
- Choose Among Alternatives
- Take Action
- Review Your Decision
Top Books on Decision Making Processes
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Authors: Gary Klein,
Conventional decision-making strategies ignore skill and experience. So for years, Gary Klein studied firefighters, pilots, and chess masters to conclude how they make decisions, especially when it is hardest to do so. In Sources of Power, Klein teaches us to make better decisions and to identify the strengths we possess that can facilitate even the most difficult tasks.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
Authors: Annie Duke,
Annie Duke shows you a smarter approach to decision-making, where you analyze the odds of your decision failing and prepare for failure as well. Not only will this guarantee success in the long run, it will also boost your confidence and help you remain calm even when circumstances change completely.
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
Authors: Chip Heath,Dan Heath
The decisions we make are often affected by our biases, confidence, and emotions. The brain is an extraordinary organ but when presented with an opportunity to make a decision, it becomes pretty useless on its own. In Decisive, the Heath brothers use extensive research and answer the questions that plague our mind during the burdensome task of decision-making.
Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
Authors: John S. Hammond,Howard Raiffa, Ralph L. Keeney
Making decisions is one of the most challenging tasks in life. Whether it is the purchase of a new vehicle or a change of career, John S. Hammond shows you how you can make wise choices. His strategies will make every moment of your life more fulfilling and less regretful. He gives you a way to remain firm even in the face of the unknown.
Other concepts on Change
Fact, Fiction & Biases
We like to think that we make our decisions logically and based on facts. The truth however is vastly different. Our actual decision making is far from scientific, and is subject to a whole variety of biases, external influences, emotions, psychological and other factors that often have little to do with a logical interpretation of information at hand.
Mini Habits
Mini-habits break down large change, into small incredibly easy things to do. The power of mini-habits is that it makes it a lot easier to start and allows you to build momentum, which makes it easier to take larger steps without the same amount of effort.
Critics
Whenever you try to do anything of importance, you will always stumble upon people waiting to tell you why it cannot be done. Often, these people are the ones closest to us, including our close friends and family. To succeed in any venture, you have to learn to disregard the inevitable negative voice of critics and forge ahead on your own path.