How to make a Perfect Decision

If someone asked you to tell them how to make a decision, you would probably come up with some good advice. It might be something like this:

List the options
Consider the pros and cons of each option
With steps 1 and 2 in mind, apply reason and experience to make the decision

Now answer this question: how often do you make decisions using this same advice? Following a structured plan is the first step to improve decision making. However, if you're like most people, you keep that structured plan stuck in a nice, secluded area in your mind.

You use the plan only when something triggers a warning to get serious. For instance, if a bad decision would cost you money or prestige, you might be inclined to pull out the plan and use it. Your mind may label some areas of your work as "research required," and that may also push you into a structured decision.

With these few exceptions, most decisions are produced in our unconscious. We just grab a convenient intuition and hope that it works.

Intuitions have an especially interesting role in decisions. When we don't have time to make careful decisions, we have to rely on intuitions; but, we ought to understand what we're dealing with.

Intuitions come from our accumulated knowledge and wisdom. They also come from our accumulated biases and outmoded beliefs. Obviously, the more knowledge and fewer biases and outmoded beliefs you store in your brain, the better your intuitions will be. Unfortunately, intuitions still have a great weakness: they don't come with a list of pro/con statements, the kind you use in structured decisions. Without that list there is no ready way to examine the quality of an intuition.

In general, you'll make consistently better decisions when you base them on a careful, structured approach. If it's well constructed, the structure makes you consider options that are new and unfamiliar. In a dynamically changing world, you need to look beyond your experience, maybe even beyond your comfort zone to find answers.

But don't reject intuitions entirely; they actually work well with structured decisions. When your information is just too tangled to unravel, intuitions help you find conclusions so that you can move on. When you've evaluated your options and remain uncertain, intuition can give you the confidence to go ahead and make the decision.

I like the phrase, "informed decisions," when considering the partnership between structured decisions and intuition. The problem with the classic, structured decision that we started with is that it implies that the answer lies within the structure. Actually, a good structure of cutting edge knowledge and reason can get you close to the answer, but to make the decision, you'll need some intuition.