Throughout the course of our lives, there will be a handful of times where we come to a proverbial fork in the road that makes us stop and think. The choice we make here will have significant repercussions and could alter the course of our life! In situations like these, it helps to have a framework for how to make a decision.
Why bother with a formalized system of decision making? Each day you make countless choices; most of which you barely notice . These take the form of automatic reactions, habits, or low impact things like what to watch on TV. However, every so often, life also demands that you make a decision where the stakes are high. The result of these choices matter enough that they make you pause and think. These are the decisions that keep you up at night or leave you in the dreaded state of “analysis paralysis.”
This article will describe how to make a decision more effectively.
For clarity, in this article, a decision is a conclusion that you reach after some consideration in order to achieve a future goal. A meaningful decision is different from a day to day choice. This is the difference referenced above between deciding what city to live in and which season of ‘The Office’ you are going to rewatch.
There are a lot of different strategies when it comes to how to make a decision. Some people just go with their gut. Others might craft mutli-page color-coded spreadsheets painstakingly accounting for every conceivable pro and con. The common factor in all decision making models involves some way of considering and weighing various alternative solutions available to you. Many think that this is what decision making is. But there is more to making effective decisions than jumping to evaluating possible options.
When considering how to make a decision, you must have some future goal in mind. With any future goal, something will stand in the way: a problem. The goal and the problem are different sides of the same coin.
Boiling it down, making a decision is just choosing between multiple ways to solve a problem, in order to achieve your goal.
To illustrate the decision making process, we’ll refer to an example goal of getting a promotion. The problem in this scenario is: how do you get a promotion?
Step One: Understand the Problem
The first step to making an effective decision is developing a thorough understanding of the problem. When it comes to difficult decisions, we often jump to moving forward without stopping to examine the problem at a deeper level. This, unsurprisingly leads to making “bad” decisions that ultimately do not achieve our goals.
What might this look like in the promotion example? On average, we can assume promotions come with a salary increase along with more status. They also could mean more responsibility, more work, and longer hours. Why haven’t you been promoted already? Is there a typical path to promotion in your company that requires milestones you have not achieved yet? These are the types of considerations and questions that can help you get a better understanding of the problem in the decision making process.
We often fall for the first plausible explanation of a problem, then go about trying to find solutions for it without ever considering other alternatives. This can be even worse in a group situation, where the loudest person suggests the problem and everyone else jumps in with solutions. Rarely is the detailed understanding of the problem challenged, and therefore it is not fully understood.
We do this to ourselves as well. Because it feels good to solve any problem - we often ignore important hard problems for easier, more palatable ones. In the promotion example, you might jump to the conclusion that you must not be working hard enough. The solution then becomes artificially clear: just work harder. But is that really the best way to get a promotion?
We waste a lot of time making decisions that do not serve our goals in the long run because we don’t understand the problem. The solution might be good, but the question was bad. You can’t effectively solve a problem you don’t truly understand. Oftentimes, when you take the time to better understand what you’re trying to do, the problem you’re trying to solve, the solution becomes obvious. The decision becomes easier to make. The way you think about problems determines what you see as solutions.
Step Two: Consider Possibilities
Once you can truly say you have a deep and thorough understanding of the problem, you can start thinking about possible solutions. Coming up with solutions is asking, “How might I go about solving this problem?” Because solutions are unique to the problem, it is more helpful to consider some broad things to consider when beginning this step.
Coming up with solutions involves creativity and imagination, but it is important to remain realistic. When considering solutions, we sometimes have to confront harsh truths. These could be our own limitations, the capabilities of others, or other inconvenient aspects of reality. When you are formulating hypothetical options, make sure you’re not fooling yourself.
While you are creating realistic solutions, it is helpful to stay balanced. There is no such thing as a perfect solution, there are always tradeoffs. A good way to get a balanced view of solutions is by also asking what each solution costs? Again, it’s important to be realistic here.
Avoid binary, black and white thinking. The world is complicated and things usually exist in a gray area. When you’re thinking about solutions, it’s hardly ever just this or that. You may have blind spots preventing you from seeing the full range of options available to you. Talking to other people can illuminate blind spots you might have missed. We often get stuck in false dichotomies. Are there other ways to change the situation, or perhaps change your perspective of the situation?
Consider how solutions affect your Present Self and your Future Self. The future version of you is going to have to live with whatever decisions you make today, please remember to be kind to them. A recurring example is when present selves forget to think of their future selves right before going to a bar for the evening. Returning to our promotion example, remember that whatever your solution involves, your Future Self is actually going to have to do that! The trouble is, Future You is never in the room to voice their complaints. This hints at one of the potential barriers to decision making that we will explore in the future.
Step Three: Evaluation
Once you have a good set of solutions (hopefully at least 3) you can start to evaluate them. For the promotion example, three overly simplified hypothetical solutions might be: 1. Work harder 2. Work smarter or 3. Blackmail your boss.
These are all theoretically possible courses of action, but which one should you actually go through with? How can you evaluate these solutions? You have to come up with meaningful criteria. These criteria should be based on your values, what you find most important. It helps to look for clear, differentiating criteria between solutions. If something isn’t a meaningful benefit or cost, then it should not factor into the criteria you use for evaluating a solution. In the promotion example, the comparable criteria could be things like time, energy, cost, or legal risk involved in each solution.
Let’s briefly consider the criteria for each of our three hypothetical solutions in the promotion example. Working harder would involve significantly more time and energy. The financial cost might be low and there is no legal risk. Working smarter would not involve more time but could demand more energy. There could be a financial cost of getting further education and there is no legal risk. Blackmailing your boss is a quick and relatively low energy solution. However, it could result in significant financial costs and will most likely land you in prison (what would your Future Self say!?).
Step Four: Act
After you’ve evaluated the solutions in terms of important criteria, now it’s time to act! Not only do you know how to make a decision, by this point you have actually decided! There is just one more problem. Even though the decision has technically been made, it still needs to be enacted. In our promotion example, working smarter seems like the best option. The decision is clear enough, but…something is stopping you. Why haven’t you acted already?
It turns out that taking action, even when it comes to achieving an important goal, can be surprisingly difficult. This is because there are both internal and external barriers that can stop us from acting. Despite knowing what is right or knowing what we “should” do, obstacles can still get in the way. Negative consequences, uncertainty, procrastination, and cognitive biases are just some of the many things that can trip us up at the most crucial part of the decision making process.
Now that you have made a decision, how can you identify and overcome the common barriers that might stop you from taking meaningful action towards achieving your goal?
The answer to this question will be explored more in the upcoming post on Barriers to Effective Decision Making.
