GREAT DECISIONS DON’T JUST HAPPEN

Every day you make dozens and dozens of decisions. Most are routine decisions—when to get up, what to wear, whether to shower, what to eat, etc. You make many or most of these decisions without much conscious awarenesses, you make them by habit, sometimes by the circumstances around you (e.g., you eat what’s available in your refrigerator or pantry). Other decisions, while still pretty much routine, you make more consciously— what to do first, what to prioritize, what to skip or put off, etc.

Then there are the decisions that determine your future and life—what job to take, where to live, who to marry, what to invest money into, whether you should join a project, etc. These are the big ones, but they are not always the most influential ones. That’s because sometimes it is the simplest and smallest decision that opens the door to other even more determining decisions. You go to a training, you meet someone and that someone may become a business partner, introduce you to your future boss, or lover, or company, etc.

Decisions— we all make them, but we do not all make them equally well. Sometimes, in fact, we make really poor decisions and suffer the consequences for years, even decades. Sometimes upon discovering a really stupid decision that has created lots of pain and misery, we slap our forehead, “What was I thinking?” Of course, the answer is usually, “You weren’t!”

Instead of thinking, you were reacting, or blindly following habit and convention, or letting circumstances dictate your choices. Sometimes instead of engaging in real thinking, you engaged in hasty and superficial thinking. Sometimes instead of thinking things through you jumped to conclusions, operated from a cognitive bias, and made unwarranted assumptions precisely because you did not do real thinking. Sometimes you relied on low quality information, “fake news” and didn’t question the information before you made your choices.

The point? High quality decisions require high quality thinking. It requires the kind of quality thinking called critical thinking that gathers, processes, and tests information before jumping to conclusions. The reason you make poor decisions and poor judgments is due to your impatience, reactivity, jumping to conclusions, etc. Conversely, effective decisions making means reversing these states and attitudes. It means recognizing and catching your cognitive biases (confirmation, availability, etc.) so that you can test things with a healthy skepticism.

Imagine how your life would be different and better if only you could consistently make great decisions. Now wouldn’t that be wonderful? The problem for almost everyone is that we humans do not consistently make great decisions. Actually some people are quite skilled at

consistently making horrible decisions that create havoc in their lives. In fact, all of us at times make a lot of poor decisions. It seems to come with being human. Sometimes, we make absolutely disastrous decisions that create tremendous misery for ourselves and others and put our lives and fortunes at risk.

The good news is that we are not alone in this, if we can call this good news. Many of those who we look up to as leaders and as great decision-makers also do not consistently make great decisions. Observing examples of poor judgments as the following, you might wonder, “What were they thinking?” “What went wrong in their thinking and deciding?”

The executives in the many Swiss watch companies in the early 1970s decided to ignore Japanese quartz watches. That caused them to miss the revolution in their industry! The executives at IBM choose to focus on typewriters and giant mainframe computers and thought there was no market for a personal computer. And similarly they missed that revolution. The executives at Coca-Cola decided that they would launch a New Coke, only to have to re-decide that decision. Quaker Oats executives acquired Snapple as an acquisition and then found that the deal soured its earning. Poor decisions by intelligent men and women! Steve Jobs made a disastrous decision when he choose John Scully to be the CEO at Apple. That didn’t turn out good for him at all.

By way of contrast, Bill Gates reconsidered his first decision about the internet and made one that turned out to be brilliant. William Hewlett and David Packard made a bold decision to move HP niche in test equipment and into the computer industry which turned out to be a great success story. What’s the difference? What determines the quality of decisions— the poor ones from the brilliant ones? How can we learn to become a more intelligent decision-makers?

This dilemma about the quality of decision making is universal. Ever since the first decision makers choose “the knowledge of good and evil,” we the daughters of Eve and sons of Adam have lived outside the Garden and have been prone to making many poor decisions. I suppose it is one consequence of free will. We’re free to make really stupid decisions.

We are also free to make really great decisions, but that requires mindfulness, intelligent information gathering and processing, patience, and the skill to think things through in order to “make up our minds” in a way that will serve us long-term. In other words, to make a stupid decision all you have to do is react emotionally and mindlessly failed to think things through and that takes no preparation.

Conversely, to make great decisions consistently takes preparation— lots of it. It demands a rigor and thoroughness. It requires developing intelligent strategies that will allow you to make the most of information, turn that information into knowledge, and then apply your criteria (values) as you consider trends and probabilities about future events. It requires asking appropriate and incisive questions that get to the heart of things. That’s where the Meta-Model and Executive Thinking (2018) comes in.