How do we make decisions?
5/Jul 2015
By decisions I don’t mean what to have for lunch or what clothes to wear. I mean important decisions that have a measurable impact on our lives. I have found that I, and most people, make these decisions given the information we have and try to think the possibilities through and choose the best option.
This sounds like it is a pretty good way to go about the problem, but I think we are forgetting a big part of the analysis is based on the information we have. But how thorough were we in gathering the information? Along with the depth of the information we also have to then verify if the information is in fact valid and trustworthy.
Then we have to make the last very important, yet difficult step, of quantifying the information. We all know we can’t compare apples and oranges, yet that is exactly what we do in everyday life. Because we have become so adept at it in the small decisions we carry unbalanced comparisons over to the big decisions as well.
This process of quantifying the information that we gathered does feel strange in some situations but when you get used to doing that as part of your decision making process you can start to get much more confident in your decisions because even if you made the wrong decision in a certain instance, you can and should go back and see where you made the mistake.
This process also allows us to remove a lot more emotional and situational bias that other wise might have slipped through the process undetected to change the outcome of the decision. This means that we won’t notice the problems in our decision making even when reviewing them because the same bias still exists. That is why it is so important to split the decision process into parts and concentrate on one part at a time so as not to influence the outcome. This also then allows us to go back and analyse and improve each part of the process for future decisions.
In summary the whole decision process should really be designed with though given to the information gathering, verification and quantification methods. Which will make the actual deciding much easier even obvious and also make it much more reliable and repeatable.
Did you have all the information you needed?
If the decision turn out correct or not you should see if you missed some source of information. This should not just be a quick check that all the obvious sources where queried but if new sources came to light afterwards if there was some way that you could have found those sources before making the decision. Try to look for patterns or methods that can help you next time so you can learn something and not just berate yourself for missing something. Remember this is about learning and improving your decisions and processes.Did I quantify and weigh the information I had correctly?
Another common mistake is to bias the information that you did gather in some way. This is very hard to detect while you are evaluating your choices. This is just another reason that you should always review your process and learn from it be it correct or wrong.
Also remember that most decisions also contain a certain amount of risk and chance so this is not a precise science but it allows you to correct and hone your process so that you can become confident that given the resources you had at you disposal, you made the best decision and will do so again given the next decision.
Do a sanity check
It is very helpful to just do a sanity check after you reached a conclusion by testing the answer against some rough plan or known property. This is very context specific but could be something as simple as asking a friend who has done something similar if the answer you arrived at looks correct. In another situation you could maybe reverse the process and work backwards, like you do when writing down a phone number spoken out loud.The idea is just to construct some quick test that would hopefully not fall prey to the same mistakes or traps that would trip you up while weighing the options up in the first place. Be sure to make sure that you also test for the negative case to avoid confirmationbias.
I am sure there are many other things that one should consider when making decisions. I though of a few more while writing this post. Please tell me about them in the comments section.