Know Your Objectives and Go with Your Gut: 6 Tips to Improve Your Decision-Making
Making decisions can be a difficult skill for any corporate professional, regardless of years in corporate life.
Developing this skill can be especially challenging for new managers or those without experience developing their own decision making approach. In many cases, you will also combine your own approach with your employer’s best practices or needs of the business, which can meaningfully impact your process. Between the perception (or reality) of high stakes, the consideration of all aspects of the issue, and quick timing, there are many factors that contribute to a decision’s difficulty and the pressure to make the correct choice. In this Article, we discuss six tactics to help you make your best decisions.
Don’t Avoid the Decision
First and foremost, recognize that a decision must be made.
If you are the key decision maker on an issue, you often do not have a choice to pass the decision to another person - nor should you want to! While avoiding the decision may sound like the easy option, consider that this procrastination does not serve you in the immediate or long-term. Try to stay focused on the matter and commit to the best path available, in a timely manner.
When faced with a difficult decision, it can be tempting to take the easy road and procrastinate. In fact, procrastination is not the refusal to decide, or to ‘freeze’ a decision in time, rather it is the active decision to remain undecided. It is only when you realise that procrastination is a decision that you will start finding this option less attractive. Moreover, indecision and procrastination do not postpone the pains of a decision to a future day: they multiply that pain by spreading it across every minute of every day, until you finally decide. (1).
Easier said than done, right? Sometimes focusing on the decision and committing to figure it out is the hardest part of the choice.
Attempting to consider things while distracted by other tasks may prolong the process when making a choice. Taking time to focus on the decision allows you to consider all aspects of the options and reach a logical conclusion. Choose a time when you are feeling focused and centred to sit down and look at things logically. (3).
Remember to clear your mind to bring your attention to the matter at hand. When you set your focus to a decision, you are more likely to achieve a favorable outcome, using every piece of data available to you.
Determine your Objectives - What Is Your Best Case Decision?
Start backward: what do you need to achieve with this decision? When you identify a key end result of the decision chain, or the best case “win” scenario, you can connect the dots to the immediate moment.
Objectives are the ultimate goals that a decision aims to achieve. When making a difficult decision, it is important to list your objectives and cross-check how many of them would be satisfied by each decision. Research by Valentina Ferretti at the Department of Management in the London School of Economics has shown that our decisions frequently suffer from having too narrow a range of objectives (perhaps because we are not thinking outside-the-box enough). Overall, Ferretti’s advice is to increase the number of objectives by around 50 per cent. (1).
Consider some key questions:
What are your goals?
What are the goals of the other key stakeholders?
Who else will this decision affect and can they contribute expertise to make this decision easier?
Are there multiple routes to success?
Weigh the Pros and Cons
Sometime it takes a good old fashioned list to help you make your best decision. Listing the positives and negatives of each option can help externalize the decision and make your options (and impact) more plain. Further, you can rationalize your list by looking at potential success rate of each option:
Annie Duke, the author of How to Decide (2020), recommends . . . making an estimation of the likelihood of each of those outcomes happening. [T]his approach has particular merit if you are finding it hard to distance yourself from a preferred option, or to rid yourself from potentially irrational positive or negative biases. (1).
Another practical tactic could be a listing out a decision tree. This will help illustrate the downstream impacts of your decision or identify key stakeholders to assist your thought process.
You might sketch out a rough decision tree, listing all potential moves and all probable outcomes, or designate certain people to act as devil’s advocates to find holes in your thinking and prevent you from rushing to conclusions or succumbing to groupthink. (2)
Go With Your Gut
While not always advisable to make emotion-based decisions, listen to our emotional responses can inform our decisions. By considering (not deferring to completely) our “gut responses”, we can determine if a course of action is advisable ethically, morally, or even practically - can this course of action be realistically achieved or is this a pie-in-the-sky decision? Such considerations can redirect to more desirable paths, or lead us away from actions that we do not “feel” would have a good outcome.
Sometimes you choose and walk away feeling as though you have selected the right option. Sometimes you may make choices that leave you feeling doubts. These decisions provide an excellent opportunity for growth. You can use these times to focus on what you can learn from the situation and remember that although the situation may be different from what you had hoped, you can always work towards changing it. (3).
Sometimes the “gut response” occurs after we have made the decision, either positively or negatively. Even if the response is after the decision, we can register our gut reaction, and the outcome, to guide future decisions.
Ask the Right Questions
Our best decisions often result from continued and consistent fact-finding and strategic questioning. The below are just a few examples of key questions for your thought process.
Why are we taking this decision?
What do we think will happen if we do?
Is the benefit of taking this decision proportional to the risk?
Do we have a common understanding and position on the situation?
Is the collective decision in line with my professional judgment and experience? (1)
Of the possible solutions to your problem, which is most likely to work?
Which is most resilient? And how resilient and flexible are you? (2).
Be Confident in the Decision
You have now considered your objectives, weighed the pros and cons, and asked your key questions. The final step of your decision is establishing your confidence in the decision.
How will you figure out what you can live with? Imagine yourself explaining your decision to a close friend or a mentor—someone you trust and respect deeply. Would you feel comfortable? How would that person react? It may also be helpful to write down your decision and your reasons for it: Writing forces clearer thinking and serves as a form of personal commitment. (2).
And even if you are not 100% sure, be confident in the result based on your best efforts.
Even if your decision produces different results than those you were aiming for, making a choice helps to get things going. Moving forward provides you with direction and helps you to end up where you ultimately want to be. (3).
Conclusion
Making decisions is a valuable skill developed over time and experience. By leveraging these six tactics, you can begin to become more comfortable with the decision-making process, find your own techniques, and develop confidence in your results.
Citations
Badaracco, Joseph L. “How to Tackle Your Toughest Decisions.” Harvard Business Review, 12 Feb. 2020, hbr.org/2016/09/how-to-tackle-your-toughest-decisions.
Bikart, Joseph. “How to Make a Difficult Decision.” Psyche, 5 Jan. 2022, psyche.co/guides/how-to-make-a-tough-decision-break-it-down-and-listen-to-your-gut.
“How To Make a Difficult Decision in 8 Simple Steps.” Indeed Career Guide, 14 Oct. 2022, ca.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/how-to-make-a-difficult-decision.
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