Dystopian Decision Making: Ready, Fire, Aim, Always Results in Collateral Damage. Who Will be Our Katniss Everdeen?

Today’s decision-making trees have become more like burning bushes. Whether individuals opining on PhD’s not being able to call themselves Doctor, or business leaders making rash decisions, we have entered a period of dystopian decision making which includes:

1.?????Ready, Fire, Aim

LinkedIn members of a certain vintage will remember the sage advice of putting a letter in a draw for 24-hours, reading it again, and only then, if you were satisfied with its contents, would it be sent. Invariably edits would be made and tones toned down. Today, social media posts and other decisions are made instantaneously, often with negative repercussions.?

2.?????Little or No Critical Thinking or Purposeful Debate

The dumbing down of our education systems has resulted in numerous people not having the ability to think critically, and thus to debate a decision and or its potential outcomes before it is made.

3.?????The Systems Lens Appears to be Broken

When systems thinking is applied to decision making it drives us to research the potential outcomes of a decision across all stakeholder units. Quite often, a decision that might be positive for one set of stakeholders may have a hugely adverse effect of other stakeholders. Today, this does not seem to matter if only the coveted stakeholders are the ones to benefit. This “tribe” mentality usually results in an eventual implosion.

4.?????The Instantaneous Satisfaction Decision

No credence is given to the longer-term implications of a decision if the decision satisfies a need (or whim) today. This ultra “shortermism” method usually has disastrous effects sometime in the future.?

5.?????The Death of Meritocracies

The tendency to think that people who do not agree with us must be bad people is a real problem in decision making. There was a time when gathering valuable input from all stakeholders was an imperative, however, today, if only those like us agree, we blindly go ahead and choose a path that often leads to disaster.?

6.?????The Non-Informed Decision

How ironic is it that when we have unfettered access to virtually all the information we need (the Internet) we choose to ignore it. People no longer make informed decisions, they simply use the Ready, Fire, Aim, methodology to blindly follow anyone that aligns with what they believe in, no matter how far from reality it might be. Of course, a lack of ability to think critically will result in the inability to sort the wheat information and data from the chaff.?

7.?????Vendetta Decisions?

Making decisions based upon deliberate strategies to hurt another entity or person, when one has full knowledge that the opposite decision is the right one for people, planet, and or profit.?

8.?????Decision Trees or Burning Bushes?

Steps in a well thought out decision tree:

·??????Is this a decision that even needs to be made?

-???????Why?

-???????Why not?

-???????When?

-???????Which stakeholders must be consulted to decide whether to make the decision??

-???????Do we currently have enough data and stakeholder input to warrant making the decision?

·??????What are the likely (current and future) outcomes on all stakeholders of making or not making the decision?

-???????On People (employees, customers, vendors, our community etc., etc.)

-???????Financial

-???????Environmental?

·??????Is our meritocracy intact?

·??????Have we considered all options and are we fully informed??

Steps in a not well thought out decision tree:

·??????A ready, fire, aim, uniformed, knee jerk reaction that plays to a herd or tribe mentality that searches for instantaneous satisfaction based upon a myopic view of the problem or world.?

Today, if you use words like critical thinking, debate, systems lens etc., etc., you are thought of as an “elite”.?

Dystopian Decision Making is Already a Problem that is at Scale

Business

The US has +/- 22,000,000 registered companies with +/- 16,000,000 of them operating daily. Combined, they employ +/- 130,000,000 people, they touch every family and community in the country, they are our economy, and they all touch the environment. New companies are being born every day; just as existing businesses close every day. To say that the leaders of these companies are the most important people in the sustainable future room would be a massive understatement.?

Between them, the owners, leaders, and managers of these companies make hundreds of millions of decisions each day, and we as a country, or even as a world, eventually feel the ripple effects (good and bad) of many of them.?

Consumer

The US has +/- 330,000,000 million residents, combined they make billions of decisions every day, the most important of which should be where they spend, invest, or donate their money, because with each one they are voting for the future they wish to see. Sure, once every 2 or 4 years those of us eligible and with the desire show up at a polling booth, but a material amount of us are using the Dystopian Decision-Making Process to cast our votes.??Politicians are fully aware of this and are leveraging it to their advantage.?

When a critical mass of people embrace the dystopian decision-making process, it creates a race to zero that will result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. This problem will cause our demise way before climate change or anything else. I hope for our sake that we can return to a Ready, Aim, Fire mentality and avoid a dystopian future that could be created because we have forgotten the fundamentals of decision making.?Hopefully we will find a Katniss Everdeen to make critical thinking cool again, before it is too late.?