Dealing with uncertainty – results from a survey about important decisions people are facing in 2015

Last week, me and Tommi Pajala asked you to respond to a survey. We collected, in total, 22 serious decision problems that people are facing in 2015. Here is Tommi's analysis of the same results.

The main finding is: Career choices are important and they are challenging due to trade-offs and uncertainties. See Figure 1 for a distribution of the decisions by category. The decisions are listed in Figure 2.

Besides uncertainty in consequences, five other aspects that were found challenging are uncertainty in preferences, timing, clarifying objectives and specifying alternatives. In this post you find more about my thoughts on these and what to do about them.


Figure 1: Distribution of the decisions in categories.
Categorization based on my judgment.

Help us to write better and more influential blog posts! Respond to a short questionnaire about important decisions you'll be facing.

I and Tommi Pajala are doctoral students in decision making related fields and like to blog about the topic.

Please help us create better and more focused content by responding to a short questionnaire about the important decisions you will be facing in 2015.

Link to the questionnaire. Responding takes only a couple of minutes.

We will be posting the interesting results later in our blogs. In general, knowing what people consider to be their important decisions will help us focus on the aspects of decision making that might be relevant for them.

Tuomas and Tommi

Thank you!

Should you decide now or later? -- The pros and cons of delaying a decision

The situation where we can make a decision now or delay it occurs basically every day in our personal lives and at work. Two examples are:

• Should I rent the best apartment available at the moment (e.g. a nice two-room apartment at Helsinginkatu) or search for a better one?
• Should we (a team that builds ad campaigns) decide the sub-elements included in the advertisement campaign now, or should we start with some parts and decide about the rest as the overall picture becomes clearer?

These are obviously important decisions and as in any important decisions the rational procedure is to think of the pros and cons of the possible actions. Here the possible actions are ‘make the decision now’ and ‘delay the decision’.