To Be Or Not To Be
“To be or not to be is the question” – is the opening phrase of a soliloquy uttered by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
We would have come across many such questions in our life: Some small ones – Do I continue my diet or eat this yummy ice cream just for today? Do I take this route or the other one to office? Do I buy this expensive phone or go for a low end one?
And some really big ones – Do I opt for a post graduate program or continue working? Do I change my career to a more interesting line or stay in the current role? Do I learn to be happy with what I have or aspire and work towards that elusive goal?
We make many decisions in a day, some of them unconscious. To navigate through the vicissitudes of life gracefully, our ability to take quality decisions plays a key role. Though there are only a handful of decisions that we take needs deliberation, we dread the process. Just to avoid decision making, we often subscribe to the majority opinion even when it is obvious that the majority is wrong.
We do not have control on which home we were born. From then on till adolescence, most of our decisions are made by parents or loved ones. In most cases, choice of college is the first decision one makes. The other major decisions are choosing a career, deciding on whether to get married and whom to get married to, having kids, buying a house and may be a couple more. In the context of well-knit families, most of these major decisions are also made in consensus with the family. So, our decision making muscles are not exercised enough and as the principle of use & disuse goes, the muscles are weak in most cases.
Evolution has prepared us for more than 4 million years with a fully developed decision making engine. It comes with a hardware of tremendous processing speed -38 thousand trillion operations per second. The software is so advanced that it has the capability to change the hardware it is running on to suit itself. With such an amazing tool at our disposal we hardly use it for taking quality decisions. Probably because the only thing evolution did not do is to come up with a user manual, a cruel trick!
Let us try to understand why it is so difficult to take good decisions. If you come to think of it, it is not the decision but owning the consequence of the decision that is scary. The fear stems from the need of acceptance from people around us. If we do not learn to take decisions on our own, our life will be a function of whims of others.
Intellectually every decision is the same but emotionally they are not the same. What makes a choice easy or difficult is the way the alternatives relate. If only we could see the result of our choice beforehand, it will be much easier to decide.As we do not have that privilege, is there a way where we can reduce this puzzle to a series of steps or a flowchart?
Before we get into decision making, let us focus on the pitfalls or the Decision traps
1. Stimulus overflow – Way too many choices are overwhelming. Many young adults do not know what to do. They know that they can do anything they want but do not know what they want. They are paralyzed because of too many options.
2. High performance – Demand for high performance and zero tolerance for error in judgement is making us paranoid.
3. Perfectionism – The classic myth of perfection, where we only start to act when we are complete the task with perfection. Imagine every day we decide to get out of house only when all the traffic signals in the route are green, when would we reach the destination.
What top decision makers do?1. They know who they are and what they want. They set their own standards based on their values.2. They are good at Self-management, esp. their emotions3. They believe in action.4. They don’t seek perfectionism. If they have 80% of the information to take decision, they start to take action.5. They train their brains to make decisions under stress6. They are big advocates of their conviction. They stand for what you believe in.
The Process:First and the most important part of the decision is to know what is the end goal, to move out of the grey area in your own Grey matter :). As Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind.Once we are clear of what the end goal, we then decide on whether we use an elaborate model for decision making or use intuition? (Again another decision!). A thumb rule is that stress can temporarily lead your gut down the wrong path, so do not trust your gut while under stress.
Sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgement. The challenge is to sift through and focus on only the most critical information. Better judgements are executed from simplicity and frugality of information.
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lack the latter.
Using a step-by-step decision-making process can help you make more deliberate, thoughtful decisions by organizing relevant information and defining alternatives.
Step 1: Identify the decision: Clearly define the nature of the decision you must make. This first step is very important.
Step 2: Gather relevant informationCollect some pertinent information before you make your decision. This step involves both internal and external “work.”
Step 3: Identify the alternativesAs you collect information, you will probably identify several possible paths of action, or alternatives.
Step 4: Weigh the evidence Draw on your information and emotions to imagine what it would be like if you carried out each of the alternatives to the end. Evaluate whether the need identified in Step 1 would be met or resolved through the use of each alternative. Finally, place the alternatives in a priority order, based upon your own value system.
Step 5: Choose among alternatives Once you have weighed all the evidence, you are ready to select the alternative that seems to be best one for you. You may even choose a combination of alternatives.
Step 6: Take actionYou’re now ready to take some positive action by beginning to implement the alternative you chose in Step 5.
Step 7: Review your decision & its consequences In this final step, consider the results of your decision and evaluate whether or not it has resolved the need you identified in Step 1. If the decision has not met the identified need, you may want to repeat certain steps of the process to make a new decision.
Mark Twain said that “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.”
What force has the greatest influence on us, what resonates with our soul the most – it is the freedom to choose. Our life is the sum total of all our choices.
