I am a PhD student in Systems Analysis and Decision Making. I created this blog to share my ideas about how to make better decisions to live better lives and to make the world a better place. In this post, I will explain what I see as the four cornerstones of good decision making.
Defining what is better is crucial for any decision making whether it is related to private life, public or corporate decision making. In all of these cases, ‘better’ is subjective and the decision maker gets to decide what he cares about in a particular decision. My feeling is that we often make decisions without giving much thought to what we care about in that particular decision. (1) Knowing what you want is the first cornerstone of good decision making. The better you know what you want, the more capable you are of comparing your alternatives.
A good thing about restaurants is that there is a menu from which we can read our alternatives. Should you have fish or steak depends then on what you want. Oftentimes, however, the decision problems we face are not this easy. I am willing to claim that on average we make better decisions the better our alternatives under consideration are. Surely we cannot choose any better than the best of those alternatives we happened to consider. Thus, the second cornerstone of good decision making is (2) ability to come up with good decision alternatives.
The big decisions we face tend to be complex. Even if the 19 year old me graduating from high school would have known what he wanted (such as interesting studies, good job opportunities after graduation and chance to meet interesting and likeminded people) how could have he known which alternative will best deliver it. This leads to the third cornerstone: (3) Ability to estimate the consequences of alternatives.
I believe many of us have been in a situation where we have identified a good course of action but for some reason are unable to act on it. Often, at least for me, the reason is related to fear, shame or to breaking the status quo. Therefore, my fourth cornerstone is the (4) ability to take action.
I hope you enjoyed reading my first blog post! Part of this blog will be devoted to writing about how each of us could become better at these four cornerstones of good decision making. I will try to write at least twice a month.
Please leave any feedback to the comments. At this point, I am especially interested in ideas that help me become better writer (e.g. grammar, style, topics I write about) or that improve the blog (e.g. layout, structure).
Hi Tuomas,
ReplyDeleteVery nice post! I can see you're a scientist and like to consecrate rational choosing. I feel like powerful rational choosing methods would be best put to use when also more common intuition based decision making is understood.
I'd really like to suggest you the book "The Art of Choosing" by Sheena Iyengar if you haven't already read it. It's a more psychology/biology based popular science book that discusses different studies done about choosing.
Really good post! Waiting for more to come!
Hi, thanks for reading and commenting! I agree with your point that rational choosing methods alone do not suffice.
DeleteThe first three cornerstones of good decision making are indeed drawn from the fundamentals of rational choosing theory (more specifically my reference would be multi attribute value theory by Keeney et al.). Indeed, I believe that people can significantly improve their decision making with simple insights drawn from that body of knowledge. However, I acknowledge that there is much more to decision making, and I like that you brought this up. Personally, I have read about decision making quite widely (e.g. behavioral decision theory, biases and heuristics, construction of preference, participatory decision making, behavioral economics, neuro economics).
By including “ability to take action” (which sometimes could even be labeled as “courage”) as the fourth cornerstone I already step to the realm of behavioral decision making and I inteded to do so also in future :)
At the moment I am thinking about two posts. One would be related to finding the balance between using practical, operational objectives and knowing your fundamental objectives. I call it the balance between how’s and why’s. Second post would be an analysis of what the Finnish president really meant when he said that whether Finland joins Nato or not cannot be determined based on a plus and a minus list (which I think is theoretically possible, but possibly not wise in practise).