Making Smart Decisions-The Hidden Traps in Decision Making
Making decisions is the most essential and important task of any executive. And it’s the toughest and trickiest risks/tasks to carry out. Because it doesn’t only affect the business gaols and performance also its results can have impacts on the employees and consumer’s lives (people) and maybe on the whole country economy. So, where do the bad decisions come from? Well, in many cases is due to the decisions that were made in the past and clearly because the risks and opportunities were not recognised and pictured. Thus, adverse decisions come from the past, why?
By now you are familiar with the unbelievable power of your suggestions mind and why people react differently to the same suggestion. You understand the role of your conscious mind works like the “watch man at the gate” also works like the bridge between the environment and your subconscious mind you are surrounded by. Subconscious mind doesn’t have the ability to compare or contrast. Therefore, your conscious mind works like a data scientist and your subconscious mind works like a computer “robot”.
Also, anybody in business field like project managers, analysists, risk managers and so on are familiar with past recorded reports to avoid past bad decisions that declined the business’s vision, mission and goals. But also, it depends on the business leadership, management and preferences as they are not many organisations that value data to keep records of their business activities.
The link between psychology and business stands out right here, why?
Because so many of decision makers are trapped within their mind traps (The wrong/adverse seeds from past that been watered and grown strongly consciously or unconsciously). Researches have been studying the way our minds function in making decisions. According to HBR a research identified and revealed that we use unconscious routines “subconscious seeds”, and they call it heuristics. For example, the clearer an object appears, we closer judge it to be. Yet, like most heuristics, it is not fool prove. I do believe it’s due to not many people are aware or understand the power of their subconscious mind.
Here is couple of the mind traps and techniques to help us to make better decisions.
The Anchoring Trap
Let’s begin with a question. How would you answer these two questions?
- Is the population of Persia greater than 45 million?
- What is your best answer of Persia’s population?
Please write down or comment your answers and in the next blog I am going to explain why I ask you to answer these two questions.
The Statue-Que Trap
There are only rare people that are not over confidence and don’t think that always they make rational and logical decisions but most of us think the opposite. But the real fact here is that most of our decisions are based and made on bias and hype. Don’t you agree? I am sure intelligent researches agree with this statement.
Why do I say intelligent people understand and recognise the mentioned fact?
For example, I can confidently say Princess Diana was one of a firsts who recognised and understood the differences between the finding an academic gap and people’s needs and problems. Because princess was not trapped within the adverse/bad seeds so Princess Diana’s garden was full of beautiful, beneficial and intelligent seeds towards humans.
This is the reason, the golden key why our Princess made the most intelligent decisions and yet all of us are benefiting from those decisions. Because Princess Diana didn’t base her decisions on biases, hypes or like some scientists whom exposing fraud and negligence which I am going to interpret and give you some names as examples in near future blogs.
So, what can we do about it?
Before the first step, you need to identify and recognise your statue que traps. This is when you become capable to start these following techniques, Frist thing to realise is never think of the statues que as your only option (alternative). There are other alternatives for sure to find a solution.
Second key is to critically analyse your thoughts and critically question yourself if the statues que is the only alternative and in fact it wasn’t the statues-que. The third technique is to ignore/avoid overestimating the costs in shifting from the statues que. The fourth way is to compare, analyse and measure the alternatives in terms of fulfilling and benefiting the future as well as the present. Also, if you have several alternatives, don’t pick the easiest one only because you don’t have time or for any other reason.
In the next blog I will share seven more traps and the techniques and how to come front our mind traps.
To be continued …
MBA Blogger 