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A journalist was interviewing a successful businessman. He asked what his success was based on. The reply was “decisions.” Not being happy with the answer, the journalist asked, “What were those decisions based on?” The answer was “experience.” Still not happy, the journalist asked “how did you get that experience?” The answer – “Bad decisions.” ─ Anonymous
Every day we all make thousands of decisions. How often do we take the time to get feedback as to how well those decisions served us? The answer is not often. There is a great deal of psychological research to back the fact that we do not tend to be good observers of our own behaviour. One classic study asked a group of dieters to list, as carefully as possible, what they ate during the past week. The dieters were then put on the exact same diet that they recalled. What was the result? They lost weight because they forgot a significant number of items that they had consumed.
In order to monitor, and hence improve, your decision-making, the method that you can use has to be effective and at the same time relatively easy to use. Psychologist Gary Klein specializes in research on decision-making. Klein suggests that decision makers should become “reflective practitioners” by thinking about and articulating the elements that contribute to their decisions’ success and failures. Klein recommends that one-third of all the time that US Marines spend in simulations that are designed to sharpen their decision-making process be spent debriefing those decisions and learning everything possible to improve their decision-making in the future. However, it is one thing to think that “reflective practice” or debriefing your decisions is a good idea and it is another thing to actually do it. There are also those of us who ruminate and keep regretting our decisions but still don’t formulate a plan for what we should do differently next time. A wise colleague of mine, Patricia Morgan suggests that we turn our resentments into commitments.
Exercise: Turning resentments into commitments:
My resentment is:
In the future I will:
If you have any insights into becoming a better decision-maker, we would like to hear from you on this blog. You will also find many other decision-making hints in future blogs and in The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders: Featuring Key Insights From 32 of Canada’s Top Leaders. In our next blog we will look at how “The Weighted Averages Method ” will make you a better decision-maker.
