Improving your ability to make good decisions is not so difficult. Here are four evidence-based ways to improve your success rate.
Many people in many organisations make bad decisions every day… poor hiring choices, launching products that fail, and making acquisitions that fail to add value for shareholders.
This is not surprising given that many employees and managers have never had formal training in making effective decisions. However, there is a great deal of scientific research into how to make better decisions that has remained largely unknown and untapped.
Here are four examples of how to avoid making bad decisions…
1. Don’t make big decisions after lunch. Research into decision fatigue shows that the more decisions a person makes over the course of a day, the worse the quality of those decisions become. Human beings start every day with a set amount of cognitive resources, and every single decision made, big or small, eats away at these. For this reason, schedule the most important decisions for first thing in the morning, or at least before lunch, in order to optimise decision-making quality.
2. Dim the lights. Emotion is one of the biggest enemies of effective decision-making. A transient emotional state can lead to decisions that are overly influenced by what feels important at the moment, but may lead to decisions with poor outcomes over the longer term. To help reduce the impact of emotion when making decisions, turn down the lights a little. Research from the University of Toronto Scarborough has shown that emotions are felt more intensely in brightly lit environments. By dimming the lights, you can reduce the impact of intense emotions that may be clouding your ability to make good decisions.
“Human beings start every day with a set amount of cognitive resources, and every single decision made, big or small, eats away at these.”
3. Don’t make decisions with people who are just like you. People often default to making work-related decisions with the help of others who are perceived to be similar. The familiarity heuristic suggests humans have a preference for the familiar, and as such, often tend to associate and work with people who are just like themselves. When it comes to making decisions, however, scientists have found that we need to deliberately introduce diversity to attain better results. Research from Tufts University has found that racially diverse groups perform significantly better with decision-making compared to racially homogenous groups. In one study, mock juries comprising racially mixed people outshone all-white juries with broader deliberations, fewer factual errors and better recall.
4. Practice mindfulness for 15 minutes. Many bad decisions can be related to the “sunk cost fallacy”, whereby the more a person is invested in something, the more psychologically difficult it is to abandon it. Research has shown that engaging in 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation actually increases resistance to this fallacy. In other words, it is easier to stay focused on the present as opposed to dwelling on the past.
These are just a few of the traps that prevent people from making good decisions. So the next time a big decision presents itself, be deliberate about using strategies to maximise your effectiveness.
Dr Amantha Imber, Founder, Inventum; author of “The Innovation Formula” (Wiley)
