Planning for September: A Mindset

This is the third newsletter in the four-part series: Planning for September

You can read the part I here: A tool, for every age.

You can read the part II here: A checklist, for the full picture.

A hobby to stop or keep?

?Claudia tends to make decisions reactively. Initially, her health is fine. However, while playing football, she twists her ankle, resulting in a torn ligament. She visits a doctor and gets back in shape in a few weeks. Unfortunately, she twists her ankle again a few months later, and the cycle repeats each season. It might seem like bad luck, but that's not necessarily the case. Claudia could have proactively addressed her foot issues before any injuries occurred.

?Her goal is clear: to prevent foot injuries and continue playing football.

?What can she do to avoid twisting her ankle so frequently, or ideally not at all? There're plenty of alternatives: she could wear special shoes or orthopedic bandages, do specific exercises to strengthen her muscles and ligaments, or avoid playing on artificial turf if that’s where she often gets injured.

?But what gets in the way of Claudia making proactive decisions?

Decision problems

?Many of us experience situations where we need to make a decision more or less as problems that we need to solve.

?For example, if someone loses their job due to a reorganization of the company they need to decide what to do next. Equally, if someone is headhunted for a very attractive job in an interesting company, they will need to decide what to do. In both scenarios (even though one is negative and the other is positive) we may experience the situation as ‘problems to solve’.

?This unappealing association can happen because of several reasons. For example, because it means taking over responsibility (and potential blame if things go wrong). It also requires of us that we expend considerable cognitive effort (and time, alas!) to think through the situation. Moreover, what we decide now will probably eliminate some future options and thus reduce our decision freedom in the future! Let alone that we have a preference for the way things are (status quo) over change - even if we are not satisfied with how things are!

?So what? The problem with ‘decision problems’

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Ralph Keeney, the decision guru, explains it best:

?”Decision problems are decisions that you must face as a result of others’ decisions and/or circumstances beyond your control”.?

?As Keeney argues, we often behave reactively instead of proactively. This means that we often end up dealing with ‘decision problems’ rather than ‘decision opportunities’.

?And the way we usually go about solving ‘decision problems’, unfortunately, is by mentally following four steps that form the most commonly used decision process in practice:

1. ?We become dissatisfied with something and then identify this as a decision problem we need to solve.
2. To solve it, we search for potential solutions and quickly and effortlessly identify one or two “obvious” alternatives (based mostly on what we did in the past or what others around us are doing). We anchor ourselves to these alternative(s) and stop looking any further.
3. We then select a few criteria on which to judge these alternatives.
4. And we reach a decision based on the above.

You’ve probably guessed the problem with the above process: it's about obvious alternatives. Reminiscent of our first decisions in early childhood (‘Vanilla or chocolate ice cream?’), this focus on the obvious alternatives persists and becomes widely applied across all ages and stages of our lives.

?But it’s not a good approach. It has us looking for alternatives in a vacuum, as if our values and objectives can’t weigh in when looking for alternatives – they only appear later. In fact, studies show that when people are thinking of their options they tend to only be aware of half of their objectives relevant to the situation.

?When we do this, when we look for options without being clear of our objectives, we deprive ourselves from the very superpower of decision-making: using decisions to shape our environment to help us achieve what we want.

?We’re being reactive instead of proactive.?

?This matters because, as Siebert et al. show, proactive decision-making explains about 50% of the variation of decision satisfaction and also about 35% of the variation of life satisfaction.

?In plain words, moving from a ‘decision problem’ mindset to a ‘decision opportunity’ mindset by searching for decision opportunities more actively, we can enhance our chance to be more satisfied with our life in the long run. (Perhaps, starting this September, or sooner?)

Now what? A mindset for opportunity

Who should make your decisions? The answer is straightforward: you should.

And who should decide which decision situations to address? Ideally, it should also be you, as often as possible.

?Good decision makers intentionally create decision opportunities.

?Here’s how to switch from reactive to proactive thinking:

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1. Focus on values. Values define what is important to a decision-maker and should underpin all our actions. Therefore, these values should guide the decision-making process. If need help discovering your values, revisit this.
2. Turn values into objectives. While values may characterize a person (‘he cares for the environment’), objectives refer to practical actions (like ‘he minimizes his use of plastic’ and ‘he recycles batteries’).
3. Use objectives to come up with alternatives. By explicitly considering our objectives we can identify more and better alternatives. These may be new (ones we hadn’t thought of before) or clever combinations of existing alternatives.

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Here are some examples of turning decision problems into decision opportunities:

?Many students consider their thesis as a tiresome obligation, i.e. as “a problem to be solved”. But what if it was a decision opportunity? First, they’d need to identify their objectives (for example, if they wish to work for a certain company), and then come up with ways of how they could use their thesis as a means to achieve that.

?Remember Claudia and her football injury? She is not alone in being reactive about her health. Numerous studies have connected a high body mass index, lack of exercise, alcohol consumption, and smoking with significant long-term health issues. Reactive decision-makers often wait until these potential problems become urgent, at which point they face serious decisions. In contrast, proactive decision-makers anticipate future problems and take preventative measures. While it's impossible to guarantee the avoidance of all problems, and bad luck can still occur, proactive decision-making can decrease the likelihood of undesirable outcomes.

Question for you

What’s one situation in your life that’s important to you and is currently going well? Are there any proactive decisions you can make to maintain it?

Thanks for reading! Until next week.

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