How to make faster decisions and recover from 'wrong' ones

The puzzle pieces

In producing one single decision, not only is your prefrontal cortex working hard to help you, there are at least 8 factors that should be working in your favor.

You’ll know you’re making a great decision when they have the following elements:

• Shaped by different POVs

This doesn’t mean you should seek out everyone’s opinions. Reach out to people with relevant expertise/experience and seek for their input for a robust debate.

• Consider holistic impacts

Balance risks and potential impacts. Identify the ‘what-ifs’—how likely a negative outcome will arise and its consequences, and how far that impact would go.

• Balance short and long terms

‘Short-termism’ is a curse that plagues many decision-making frames. Even when you’re scored on a quarterly or annual basis, plan out the long-term implications.

• Communicated well

Share the substance and reasoning behind a decision to its stakeholders. Not to seek consensus, but to bring everyone up to an equal level of understanding.

• Timely

When seeking feedback, no need to wait for all parties to agree. Instead, use your own judgment and a cost-benefit analysis to chart the best course forward.

Check out the 3 other elements of a great decision in the full HBR piece here.

Setting up the track

Once you’ve gathered all the pieces of a great decision together, it’s time to plunge it through the fast track. This quick scheme is needed so we can avoid burnout and fatigue while we make our average of 35,000 decisions each day.

Indeed has come up with the 6 steps you need to take for a faster decision-making:

1. Determine the stakes. Spend less time on lower-stake decisions with the following criteria; you’re familiar with the environment, you can change the decision later, or the consequences are minimal.
2. Know your objective. Keep an ultimate goal in mind during your decision-making process, and focus on the factors and possibilities most relevant to your goal. When deciding on a new marketing strategy, base it on the objective (awareness, sales, etc).
3. Design criteria. Create a set of criteria that can help you evaluate your various options. Whether that be cost, market needs, manpower, or any other resources. Make sure this criteria relates directly to your ultimate goal.
4. Collect evidence. If, for example, you're managing a gigantic project at work, you might gather statistics related to your past projects or talk to previous project managers. But, be sure to limit your research by setting a maximum number of sources.
5. Minimize emotions. A few strategies you could try include; collaborating with others, physically jotting down the pros and cons, setting a self-imposed timer or deadline, and/or consulting with an expert.
6. Commit to the decision. Some people take too long continually reevaluating their options. Adhere to your decision to reduce decision fatigue, which will allow you to move on to the next task. You could also set only 2-3 times of changing your mind max.

Other than limiting your research, the top tips of quick decision-making include delegating responsibilities and being comfortable making mistakes. Read more on the full article here.

The misleading shortcuts

Even when you’ve created the ‘perfect’ fast track for your decisions, there will still be moments where the decision does not come out with the results you wanted. Or worse, it impacts the situation negatively.

A variety of reasons could be the cause of this:

• Mental shortcuts. Your brain relies on a number of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics, one of which is known as ‘anchor bias’. In many situations, people use an initial starting point as an anchor and then adjust it to yield a final estimate.
• Poor comparisons. When making decisions, people often make comparisons without thinking about external factors. The same group of people might behave differently at a different time, depending on their economic status at the time.
• Optimism bias. People tend to have a natural-born optimism, where we overestimate the likelihood of good results. This overly optimistic outlook stems from a natural tendency to believe that bad things happen to others but not us.

Learn more about each of the factors that could impact poor decision making in the complete article here.

After learning about the factors above, you might be thinking ‘Well, I’m not that naive to be falling trap into those mistakes’. In reality, as much as you are aware of what not to do, your situation might still lead you to making the ‘wrong’ decision.

In that case, here are a few things you should do to bounce back from it:

1. Get over it. To keep your mind from focusing on a failure, you can gain psychological distance by labeling what you're feeling. Or, you can try another emotion regulation strategy called cognitive reappraisal.
2. Learn from it. Demonstrate your learning agility by adopting a scientist's curiosity and breaking down every aspect of the process that resulted in a poor decision. You'll confront future similar situations with better judgment.
3. Stay visible. A great way to move on and thrive after a bad decision is to keep engaging with those who were impacted. Find opportunities to showcase your strengths and make positive impressions moving forward.

Learn more about the ways you can do to make a strong comeback after a ‘wrong’ decision in the full article here.

Fun fact! You’ve made at least 3 decisions to get to this part of today’s Monday Mavens edition: (1) You decided to stop and read our headline, (2) decided to click on it, and then (3) decided to read the article and scroll all the way through here.

That’s only the past 5-10 minutes of your day. After this, you’ll probably make a thousand more before ending the day.

Decision-making is critical not only to our work, but our daily life as well. Be sure to share this Edition to your overthinking friends, so they can practice deciding faster!