Decision Making : An individual process

Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions - Mark Twain

The Session Commences

"I am not good at Decision Making." he said.

"Tell me," I responded, "how did you decide that you will wear this shirt today?"

"Huh?" he looked at me confused. "I just did."

"Yes," I continued. "How? There must have been other shirts in your cupboard, right? How did you pick this one?" I can be persistent, very.

"Hmm," he exhaled, looked upwards, mentally scanning for an answer that will stop me asking questions and help him in making decisions - something his company was paying me for. I, however, had a job at hand. And that was to figure out his 'Decision Making Strategy.'

Decision Making

The human brain is an energy efficient machine. It creates processes cognitively and runs them unconsciously in order to free up the 134 bits of mental space available each second that is available for processing of information. Thus, if I were to ask you how you do something that you do frequently, you would most probably say,"I just do it. It's nothing." Within that 'just' lies a process. And that's what I was interested in getting at by using a Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) process called Modelling.

Each one of us has strategies. In fact, one each for decision making, getting convinced of something, getting motivated to do something and reassurance. We combine these four to create strategies for just about anything - from making tea to making love! We also use these strategies cross contextually - which means that our 'decision making strategy' will be the same for choosing a shirt, for ordering food from the menu, from choosing a partner and also to select a job.

Trainers teaching 'Decision Making', unless they take this into account are wasting time. Therefore 'teaching someone decision making' is a non starter. All people already have one. And hence they won't learn what you are teaching. If you force them to follow 'your strategy' they will for a couple of days and then just stop and go back to their time tested, evaluated and trusted strategy.

Linguistics

Is our language dependent on our thought? Most definitely.

Are our thoughts dependent on our language? The subject of Linguistic Determinism lead us to it. In fact, proponents of linguistic determinism argue that languages influence the ways people think.

Among the strongest statements of this position are those by Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half of the twentieth century—hence the label, 'The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', for the theory of linguistic relativity and determinism.

Whorf proposed (1940): 'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language'. And, in the words of Sapir (1929): 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. ...The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group'.

The verb form of the word 'decision' - is 'decide'. Form-wise it is akin to the words 'suicide' and 'homicide'. The suffix 'cide' in all three of the words mentioned means 'to end'. So Suicide ends your own life, homicide ends the life of someone else and decide ends the process of evaluating options. Most people, when they say they can't decide, are saying so because that would mean to give up options and that makes them uncomfortable. They would rather be in this state where there are a number of choices available than be in a state where they are stuck with just one (post deciding).

The Session Progresses

"Yes, tell me," I pushed on, " you open the cupboard. What do you select first, the trousers or the shirt?"

"The trousers," he smiled for the first time. "Definitely the trousers."

"Excellent," I smiled back as mirror neurons in the F5 Sector of the ventral premotor cortex of my brain fired knowing that positive approval will help him give me the answers that I am looking for. "So you have already picked out your trousers and by doing that you have eliminated the shirts that do not match the trousers, Right?"

"Yes," He smiled shyly. "I guess so."

"Fantastic," I ploughed on,"then what happens? You see the shirts hung or folded in a pile?"

"They are folded in a pile, colour wise," he showed me by non verbally communicating that to reach the shelf that he kept his shirts on could be reached only when he bent down.

"Good," I smiled and pointed to the space he had unconsciously pointed to. "How do you know which colour to choose?" I watched his eyes for the next input. And was rewarded immediately.

"I just know." he said.

"No," I disagreed. 'There is a self talk. You said something to yourself."

"Yes," his eyes lit up. "Yes."

"And then what happened?" I prodded him. "Did you visualise yourself wearing it?"

He looked at me aghast. "Yes" he said. "how did you know?"

"Which one did you see yourself wearing?" I ignored his question, "all of them? Or did you remember how you looked the last time you wore them?" My eyes scanning his entire body, determined not to miss out any verbal or non verbal cue.

"No" he shook his head. "I saw myself wearing the shirt which was on top. It felt good and I picked it up."

"Hmm," I looked at him. "And what would happen if the first shirt did not give rise to the same feeling? It's happened earlier, right?"

His eyes again darted around, giving me more information to use. "Yes," he nodded his head thoughtfully."Then I check the next one."

I had another googly for him. "Has it ever happened that you have felt good, worn the shirt and then changed it?"

He looked at me surprised, looked up again and scanned his memory. He looked at me nodding."Yes," he said. "It has happened." Then he preempted my next question and answered, "Then I start the process again."

"So there is a threshold," I surmised, "of feeling. If that is not met you will keep at it. Once it is reached - that specific quality of feeling, then you know that this is the one. Correct?"

He smiled. "Yes that's right."

I bent towards him so that he could see my notebook. When he did he looked at me surprised. What I had written was :-

Ve --> Vi C Vi --> Ad --> Vi C Vi --> K - --> K <-|

"What does this mean?" he asked.

"That's your strategy. That how you decide. And for the strategy to work there has to be a presupposition, that you have to know if it will make you feel good, that too a certain threshold of good. So that's why you have difficulty in deciding on stuff you have no yardstick to measure the outcome." I summarised as he looked at me as if I was speaking in Arabic.

"OK," I started off pointing to his mobile. "when you went to buy that, you first looked at a lot of mobiles. Then you compared them and selected one by talking to yourself. You would have picked that up, again compared to what you would do on the mobile - Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram?, Emails of course - sometimes long ones, and while you were visualising those, you were feeling either good or not so good at the comfort of typing. And when you did, this model matched that feeling. Am I correct?"

"Wow," he said. "I never thought like that."

What I did was played back his strategy for him in a different context. And since it made sense to him, I would now take him to a place where the strategy wasn't working and show him why. When we did that exercise he knew exactly why it wasn't working - it was because he did not have a benchmark which led to a feeling - the kinaesthetic threshold. And since that was how he exit the process, what was happening is he was going round and round without arriving at a decision.

And unless we had gone over this process, we would never have figured out where he was stuck and what needed to happen for him to be able to decide.

The Session Ends

We went over the whole process from the beginning - simulating various different scenarios. First for the decisions he could easily take and the decisions that he was seemingly unable to. And with more and more examples what I knew after the first breakdown, gradually became clearer and clearer to him. Now that we knew about the cause, getting a solution was simple.

And we did.

Epilogue

It's been more than 3 months since that session, and he has 'got back his mojo' - that's what his Boss wrote to me. Apparently he had been put into 'Decision Making Training' (I really don't understand how intelligent HR Heads get conned into paying for such stuff that has no scientific basis) which did not yield any result.

In case anyone in your company or someone who you know, or you, yourself are struggling with taking decisions - we can help you.

If you have no problems in decision making, well, Cheers!