Do You Use Intel Or Intuition? The Psychology Of Tough Decisions
Let's
face it, when forced to make a difficult call, we often just go with our gut.
But up against a tight deadline, that approach can blind us to the best decision.
Here are some ways good leaders can avoid bad moves.
Even
with great experience, talented teams, and trusted advisors, there are times
when all leaders need to bite the bullet and make lone-wolf decisions. Facing
tight deadlines, intuition usually takes the place of other guidance--but it
certainly isn’t always correct.
Overconfidence
can create illusions about the infallibility of your intuition, and steer you
to select data that just supports your initial conclusion.
Psychologist
and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman doesn’t think you should take intuition
at face value. “Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily
determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct,
not by its validity,” he told the McKinsey Quarterly.
How
can you know when you are making the right decisions? Recent research about the
influence of feelings and memory on decision-making helps us better understand
how to make informed rather than emotional decisions. Following is a checklist
for applying those findings and preventing good leaders from making bad
decisions.
Think
about how much you really know--and don’t know--about the decision.
Let’s
face it. We are biased in every situation. So the first thing to do is identify
those areas in which you are potentially biased. Realistically assessing your
knowledge of the situation can help avoid an overconfident conclusion. Overconfidence
can create illusions about the infallibility of your intuition, and steer you
to select data that just supports your initial conclusion. You can avoid this
trap by bringing different data sources to the table.
Have
a pre-mortem. Imagine you have made a decision and it’s failed.
List
all the reasons why it happened. This keeps you from avoiding anyone or
anything that challenges your narrative about the competency of your decisions
and instead dealing with potential pitfalls before they happen. The beauty of
pre-mortems is that they’re easy and help you tweak decisions in beneficial
ways.
Put
past experience in the right context--is past experience reliable feedback?
In Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make
Bad Decisions and How to Keep It from Happening to You, Andrew Campbell and Jo
Whitehead, directors of London’s Ashbridge Strategic Management Centre and
Sydney Finkelstein, explain that actions already taken--whether driven by
rational decision making or not--are filed in our brains with "emotional
tags" that serve as markers that can anchor subsequent thinking. When we
must make a decision, our brain will recall past situations that seem similar to
the current one and access the emotions that are tagged to them. These
emotional tags can seduce us into thinking that our past judgments were good,
even though objective assessments would record them as bad. For example, Andrew Mason may rely on the past
experience of not accepting Google’s offer to buy Groupon as the right
decision--but in the aftermath of all that has happened, this may not be the best
experience to draw on when facing a new situation.
Determine
the level to which emotional or external factors might sway your decision.
We
are social animals and become attached to people, places, and things. Ask
yourself, “Do I prefer this decision because it better serves those with whom I
am closest or me? Are my personal interests interfering?” You have to uncover
the source of your feelings of attachment. If the decision you are involved in
is likely to affect one of your attachments, these emotions can unbalance your
thinking. Being aware of them will greatly aid your objectivity.
Emotions
are woven into all decision-making processes in many ways in which we are not
conscious. Leaders who see themselves as making decisions in a purely rational
manner could be setting themselves--and their organizations--up for potential
disaster because they may end up believing that they are right when they are
wrong. However, you can gain control over some of these emotions by becoming
more aware of their source and more analytical and fact-based in your approach.
And you’ll feel a lot surer in your gut.
By:
Debra Kaye http://www.fastcompany.com/3012537/creative-conversations/do-you-use-intel-or-intuition-the-psychology-of-tough-decisions?partner=newsletter
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