To do or not to do…..

Decision Making (DM) is a very important life skill and like all skills it can honed and developed to ensure we make the most optimum decisions. We make decisions from the time our cognitive abilities are mature enough to start understanding the consequences of our decisions- by about the age of 11 or 12 years. Decisions impact all aspects of our life- personal and professional. In this article I will discuss the frameworks for effective decision making.

 

Firstly, to make effective decisions we must cultivate the right mindsets, habits and values to provide a basis for effective decision making. Decisions can be simple or complex, with a lot of data or under ambiguity and with irreversible or reversible consequences. So, what is the right platform that we must build to make effective decisions? To start with we must cultivate a very strong value system- what we consider as right and wrong and the principles that we abide with.

 

How does a value system help us make the right choices? Imagine having to pay a bribe to receive a service. Would you do it? Would you tell a lie to cover up a mistake? Such choices are difficult, and one may argue that they depend on the context etc. However, to make such decisions without having to make compromises, a strong value system plays a very important role. A clear sense of right and wrong. My husband likes to always tell the story of Infosys and Narayana Murthy its founder. It’s a general practice to fudge medical bills to save tax in companies. Narayana Murthy was very clear- it’s a simple choice between a right and wrong. The Infosys value system is never to blur the lines between the two, there is no compromise- it’s wrong to fudge bills. So, everyone makes a decision as per the value system. Similarly, big decisions are made in such a manner. Narayana Murthy would always love to say you must be able sleep peacefully at night after you make the decision- the best pillow is a clear conscience.

 

The next aspect of the right platform for effective decision making is preparing the mind for making the right decisions. Is the mind calm enough and in the right frame to make a decision? Most of the time our mind is very agitated with a lot of conflicting thoughts running through our heads due to stress, multi-tasking, peer pressure etc. We must learn to calm the mind and there are several techniques available towards this. I will not go into the details of these techniques in this article but Yoga, Meditation and Mindful practices are some of the popular tools and there a lot of practices around this that one can adopt. Simple daily routines can be established that calms the mind to make effective decisions.  A calm mind also hones the intuition. Intuition is a very important tool to make decisions under ambiguity.

 

Once we have the right platform, we must then have the right framework that leverages the platform. A sense of discrimination between the short term and the long term is an important aspect of effective decision making. Understanding the difference between the Urgent and the Important facilitates this. Our natural tendency is to fire fight- somehow close the issue whatever be the long-term consequences. Get done with it. However, compromising the long term always comes back to haunt us. Let me take this with the most common example that we have seen many of our friends and family do. Changing a job for a few extra rupees increase in salary. Somebody dangles a salary increase and people switch jobs not realizing that changing jobs involves considering m any parameters- is the new job the right fit, does the new work environment provides us an opportunity to grow or is it very political? Long term aspects of any decision can be arrived at by asking a few simple questions. Why am I making this choice? Is this aligned with my value system? A simple test for Long Term versus Short Term is to fast forward 10 years and see if what is urgent today becomes irrelevant then.

 

Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon has constituted in his company Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are the crucial decisions, the ones that are not reversible easily- like whom to marry, what course I need to pursue. Majority of decisions are Type 2 decisions the ones that can be reversed or even if wrong can be corrected and offer a lot of lessons. This mindset helps us to make quick decisions and move fast. This mindset is very good in a professional setting where we need to make quick decisions. Sometimes it may make sense to move fast and break things as these can be fixed easily. For example, do we introduce a new maternity leave policy? A quick decision can be made and it can be corrected if there are found to be shortcomings.

 

Another very important aspect of decision making is to be able to live with the choices we have made and to convert any decision through sheer hard work and grit to the right decision. There are times in spite of our best efforts, the consequences may not turn out as desired, In such moments we must not let regret overcome us. Its best to put our head down and accept the situation. Regret only makes a bad decision worse by not freeing up the mind to think clearly. We see this play out in a lot of times in our personal life. Our choice of a spouse- many times we make the most informed choice but things need not work out due to many reasons. In such circumstances it may make sense to first give the marriage a chance- trying everything possible to make it work. More often than not one may see that yes, it is possible to correct a wrong choice.

 

In conclusion I have distilled this vast topic to a few basic principles that have stood me in good stead in my professional and personal life. My choice framework is built on a solid foundation of Values and Discrimination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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