When you’re not
good at making decisions
Do you
think you’re good at making decisions? Think again.
Whenever
you are faced with a choice, any choice, your brain starts to work against
you. Specifically, right after you take a look at all your options, you
“fall in love” with a solution – often regardless of evidence and hard data.
Once that happens, you want that solution to be right, and will oppose any
other one, even more reasonable ones.
This is
called a confirmation bias. In simple terms it means that your first instinct
is to always go for a solution that you like, even if facts or data say
otherwise. What’s more, even if you decide to take a look at all available
evidence, you’ll still give more value to what supports your preferred decision
and vice versa.
In
practical terms, what does this mean to us?
It
means that even when presented with all evidence you will not be able to be
completely objective about your decision.
This,
unfortunately, is reality – and it’s not just some people that suffer from it:
it’s not a disease of sorts. The confirmation bias is a heavily-engrained
mental process that is stuck deep in our brain.
The
good news is that we are not completely powerless about it.
First
of all, now you know about this bias which means that you’ll be able to
recognise it when it appears. Second, even if we are not able to contrast it,
we are very much free to go around it, and in this article I will share a few tools out of my book, Effective Decision Making, that will help you do exactly that.
Grid
Analysis and KT Matrix
One way of going about it is to stop looking at the different choices as a whole and break them down in separate criteria. This way you will be able to address each criterion separately and remove the confirmation bias from your decision.
One way of going about it is to stop looking at the different choices as a whole and break them down in separate criteria. This way you will be able to address each criterion separately and remove the confirmation bias from your decision.
This
sounds more complicated than it should be, so let’s take a look at two
practical tools: the Grid Analysis and the Kepner-Tregoe Matrix.
The
starting point is the same for both: you need a few alternative choices you
could make – anywhere between two and ten is fine. More than 10 make the two
tools cumbersome, although it’s still technically possibly to use them.
Once
you have your alternatives, you need to list down what criteria are important
to you, and that is the main point that allows you to reduce your confirmation
bias.
Say,
for example, that you need to buy a new security software for your company. You
could be in love with one because most of your friends use it, but that is not
necessarily the right one for you. Let’s assume you have three alternatives and
your criteria for choosing one are the following:
·
Cost;
·
Flexibility;
·
Customer Service;
·
External appraisal/Certification.
The
first step for a Grid Analysis is to plot all Options and Criteria in a Matrix.
Following that, you need
to grade the performance of each separate option for each criterion with a
number between 1 and 5 (or 1 and 10, whatever you prefer). Once you are done,
add up each Option’s grades and compare the totals. The one with the highest
score should be your preferred choice.
If you
want to take it a step further, you can use a KT Matrix instead. This works
similar to a Grid Analysis, but allows you to rank criteria as well. For
example, Cost could be more important to you than Customer Service, so its
weight should be higher in the analysis.
The
first step is still to plot Options and Criteria on a Matrix, but instead of
grading options right after, you should first rank how important each criterion
is to you on a scale from 1 to 10.
Following
that, just like for the Grid Analysis, rank each option on each criterion.
Now,
depending on the type of choice you are making you could go for one of these
two tools or choose a completely different method (my book lists about 40).
Whatever
method you choose, though, make sure it contributes to reducing the complexity
of your choice. Sometimes we think that the more complex the method, the better
– which is a very wrong perspective!
·
Posted
by: Edoardo Binda Zane
FOR GRIDS PICTURES GO TO
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