How to improve your decision-making skills and reduce stress

What is stress???I’m sure you know. Most people know from experience. The?current pace of life?today indicates stress levels are at an all time high.?As modern technology enables instantaneous communication and being “on-call” 24 hours a day, our pace of life is accelerating.?Stress in business is defined in terms of how it impacts on your physical and psychological health; it includes mental, physical, and emotional strain. Stress occurs when a demanding scenario exceeds an individual’s ability to cope and disrupts his or her psychological equilibrium. Therefore, it follows that it will nearly always involve excellent decision-making skills to cope. Business?people are required to make critical decisions every day so what can make that task easier to perform? Effective decision-making is one obvious answer. Best practice says it is certainly a skill worth reviewing and developing. Why? Because doing it well is known to reduce stress levels, reduce costs and improve productivity.??So, where do you start if you wish to develop the skill??

The most important step in problem solving / decision-making is clearly defining or stating the?exact problem or challenge. In fact, referring to it as a “challenge” as opposed to calling it a “problem” is a good start to addressing the issue. Challenge promotes a positive vibe whereas the word problem suggests a negative one. Putting any challenge in writing will always help. Clarity is essential as clear and critical thinking are required to solve any potential challenge. As this is such a simple step, many?people overlook it. Failing to clearly state what the challenge is?can waste a lot of time and effort. In order to find a correct solution, the challenge needs to be?correctly stated. As the saying goes:?The correct solution to the wrong problem equals failure!”?Another good tip would be to consider if the challenge relates, in the main, to issues of time, money, quality or quantity or any mix of these four factors. In other words is the issue a time constraint factor? Is it essentially a financial matter???Is it a question of the quality of the subject matter not being addressed or is it a quantity issue – output simple not meeting the desired standard? 50% of cure in medicine is proper diagnosis. 50% of cure when solving challenges is also proper diagnosis!

Erik Larson, CEO of Cloverpop, in a Harvard Business review suggests the most successful decision-making approach boils down to a simple checklist.??He said:?“Our research has found that managers who regularly follow the seven steps below save an average of 10 hours of discussion, decide 10 days faster, and improve the outcomes of their decisions by 20%”.??

If this is the case it is worth reviewing the 7 steps. Here they are:

• Write down five preexisting company goals or priorities that will be impacted by the decision. Focusing on what is important will help you avoid the rationalisation trap of making up reasons for your choices after the fact.
• Write down at least three realistic alternatives. There will always be an ideal soloution, a realistic one (less than ideal but workable) and a bottom line one (minimum standard one). It might take a little effort and creativity, but no other practice improves decisions more than expanding your choices.
• Write down the most important information you are missing. We risk ignoring what we don’t know because we are distracted by what we do know, especially in today’s information-rich businesses. As the saying goes:

You know what you know. You know what you don't know.?

However,?you don't know what you don't know!

• Write down the impact your decision will have one year in the future. Telling a brief story of the expected outcome of the decision will help you identify similar scenarios that can provide useful perspective.
• Involve a team of at least two but no more than six stakeholders. Getting more perspectives reduces your bias and?increases buy-in?— but?bigger groups?have diminishing returns.
• Write down what was decided, as well as why and how much the team supports the decision. Writing these things?down?increases commitment and establishes a basis to measure the results of the decision. (I would suggest you list precisely what needs to be done, by whom specifically and by what deadline date….clarity in action).
• Schedule a decision follow-up in one to two months. We often forget to check in when decisions are going poorly, missing the opportunity to make corrections and learn from what’s happened.

I think the seven steps are a great way to tackle most of our serious challenges.

One other factor that might influence our problem-solving skills in the future could be artifical intelligence (AI). Currently AI is impacting the world of health, transportation, education and energy. It will surely have a role to play in the future but the hysteria about it shows there is no shortage of sensationalist views about how it could actually cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity.??While it is undeniable that AI has opened up a?wealth of promising opportunities, it has also led to the emergence of a mindset that can be best described as “AI solutionism”. This is the philosophy that, given enough data, machine learning algorithms can?solve all of humanity’s problems. I’m sure that is not the case.??Emotional intelligence comes into play with most business decisions (gut feel) and machines do not have an emotional button.?AI does not have a solution for everything. Not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence to it.?

Creativity is the one major challenge for AI and only you can develop this skill for you.??Study creative thinking and mind mapping.??They will help you advance to skills in this important area of life.?

Remember:?

You attract into your world people and circumstances consistent with your dominant thoughts.