A question for you: How do you and your people make decisions? Do you utilise different approaches for different environments? Do you know? Would knowing the answers to these questions help you and your team?
"If I had 6 hours to cut down a tree, I’d spent 4 hours sharpening my axe"… Abraham Lincoln
There’s a few interpretations of this fantastic quote but like all great quotes there’s a lot in a 'simple statement'
Mine is that he’s talking about getting yourself prepared in order to execute in the most efficient and optimal way possible. Planning is super important… appreciate and assess all of the relevant information efficiently in the time you have available. Execution without planning is unlikely to lead to success.
A question for you: How do you and your people make decisions? Do you utilise different approaches for different environments? Do you know? Would knowing the answers to these questions help you and your team?
Here are three common theories on how to think and decide;
Rational Choice Theory (RCT) also more broadly known as Analytical Decision Making (ADM), whereby the decision maker;
1. Gathers all of the possible information
2. Comes up with a series of options/ courses of action
3. Compares and contrasts those possible options
4. Assigns a priority or value to each of those options
5. Picks the highest score which becomes your priority
Rational Choice Theory has been the mainstay for consultants, coaches and business mentors for 3 or 4 decades.
But guess what? Evidence and studies appear to point to the fact that if time is short or the situation is volatile, uncertain, complex or ambiguous, (and let’s face it, in these uncertain times, most situations will include at least one of these elements), then RCT isn’t utilised by most decision makers.
The other obvious alternative is broadly known as Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), whereby the person:
1. Bases decisions on their past experiences
2. Considers a library of experiences and draws upon the most similar previous experience situation of a similar nature. Then compares the outcome of those previous experiences.
3. The larger the library and playbooks the more similarities, patterns and variations available to use as a basis for comparison.
4. The decisions are not improved by improving the process, they are made more effective by growing the experience base.
5. Experiential decision making can lead to opportunities to quickly recognise and lead to innovative solutions or conversely fail to think of new initiatives.
The challenge is that NDM requires repetition, mastery of skills and can be resource intensive to create that library of experiences.
The Recognition - Primed Decision-Making (RPD) Model.
This model highlights the importance of intuitive situation assessment as the basis for effective decision-making. The general premise is that in an operational environment, people rarely weigh alternatives and compare them in terms of expected efficacy.
Experienced decision-makers try to recognise familiar patterns, features, or prototypes. Potential solutions are generated sequentially and evaluated mentally (in most cases) to determine, by way of analysis, if the solution is workable.
If the solution is unworkable, it is modified or eliminated. The process continues until a workable solution is generated and selected.
The RPD model is an advanced, naturalistic method and is more relevant to an operational environment, due to its ability to be utilised dynamically in order to act quickly.
Understanding the nature of the decisions you need to make will help you identify and choose the most effective and relevant decision making model for you and your people.
Started with a quote, ending with a quote.
'Thinking is hard work; that’s why so few do it'. - Albert Einstein
