Psychology club with Lena: Decision-making

Автор: Alina

How do you make decisions: ask all your friends, relatives and neighbours and take a vote shifting responsibility on others, flip a coin, rely on intuition or put it off and hope that it will be solved by itself? Are you always satisfied with results that you get?

The right decision making usually starts with brainstorming of all possible solutions and gathering information. Essential point will be setting a time scale (deadline) and deciding who is responsible for the decision. Next step is evaluating the risks involved and consequences, analyzing the pros and cons of each action. Here you might need more techniques which you can find in links below. After that you can be ready for actually making your decision.

Why do we sometimes take wrong decisions? There are several reasons for that. First of all, it could be simple laziness, when we don’t want to search and analyze the information needed and rely instead on wrong ‘signs’. Sometimes hesitation can stop us from making any kind of decisions and results in wasted time and regrets. Dependence on partner or society may not let us act independently and make our own choice. Among other reasons there are absence of plan ‘B’, attachment to the past, isolation (in thinking, communication) and when we have too many unnecessary thoughts that blocked our thinking.

To take a right decision one should possess good decision making skills such as critical thinking, creativity, ability to take risks and responsibility for results of your actions and don’t be afraid of failures, because as Mark Zuckerberg said once, ‘In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.’ Some of these skills we discussed and trained during our previous psychology speaking club meetings and some of them will be in store.

Talking about techniques, we can mention SWOT-analysis that can be useful not only to make business decisions but can also be helpful for personal growth. When we were talking about creativity last meeting we discussed Disney Method that could be implemented in decision-making process as well, especially dealing with difficult choices. Similar, but a bit more expanded method is 6 thinking hats that helps to think parallel and view the problem from different perspective.
More useful techniques with their explanations you can find following these links:

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6162-decision-making.html - Decision-making tools and techniques

http://pivotallabs.com/6-decision-making-techniques-product-managers-know/ - more techniques with explanation how and when to use it

Don’t be afraid of making decision because you’ll never really loose in this process.