The vicious cycle or wrong decision making and how to avoid it!

Why do people make wrong decisions? Why do organizations proceed with wrong choices? What is the root cause of this unpleasant situation? How does it start? How does it stop? How can we avoid it? What exactly takes place before a wrong decision is made?

"This article is my humble effort to put things into perspective using what I’ve seen and learnt up to now regarding wrong decision making."

Thinking about my own wrong decisions, above questions were tormenting my mind during a winter Saturday morning. I had got up rather early for a Saturday and made my self a cup of hot black coffee. Sitting alone in our kitchen room, I felt my diffusion mode of thinking being obviously "on" and although I prefer playing with words I found my hand … drawing a rough diagram.

Wrong decision making had been - and still is - one of the most challenging topics for me to reflect.

Assuming that a wrong decision is the result of a process, I thought I should look backwards into previous steps.

The “chain” seemed quite straightforward:

Wrong CRITERIA result to wrong DECISIONS which result to wrong ACTIONS.

Starting from the end result (professional bizarre of an engineer):

THE ACTIONS

Wrong decisions create initiatives that will not be successful, plans that are infeasible, actions that are not appropriate. Existing problems might be temporarily resolved (at best). New projects begin with inherent serious inefficiencies. Time is an enemy. While days and months and years pass, the consequences of a long-standing wrong decision become more obvious, more difficult to handle, more dangerous.

So, time for a new decision is close. Unless the set of criteria changes another wrong initiative will take place making any previous achievements vulnerable to fading out.

And going back to the beginning (personal bizarre of a restless mind):

THE CRITERIA

We make a decision based on concrete criteria. These criteria are built within the course of one's lifetime, and they are heavily impacted by experiences, lessons learnt, social and family environment, education, mind openness, even coincidence.

“WHY” should be the first and ultimate question of a decision. In wrong decisions, usually, a huge “WHAT” swallows the extra tiny “why” not giving it a chance to breathe out.

So, the path becomes quite clear:

Wrong decisions are the result of wrong CRITERIA.  

Wrong criteria are the result of serious lack. Lack of knowledge, lack of (hard AND soft) skills, lack of experience, lack of open-minded approach, lack of humbleness, lack of passion, lack of ambition, lack of self-awareness.

Criteria are being (painfully sometimes) built throughout our lifetime. Age is supposed to enrich them, but this is not a panacea. I’ve seen lots of young people making brilliant decisions and, on the other hand, lots of grown-ups jumping from one stupid decision to the next one.

Unless we realize what we lack and unless we decide to strive to become better at it, we will permanently make wrong decisions. Wrong decisions that will seem “ok” to us.

Criteria need a lot of pre-work in order to be constructive contributors of a correct decision. Regardless how obvious it is for us, our criteria reflect our ability, knowledge, expertise, curiosity, ambition, eagerness to dig in an issue and come up with an elaborated, widely and deeply thought solution.

Criteria guide us to make choices. Decisions are choices. We make choices every day, every minute. Are they the right ones? People  who know little, but think they know much, people who refuse to learn, people who do not realize that they need to put in some effort (a very mediocre translation of the wonderful Greek word ?κ?πο?? (kopos)), will never be able to make a proper decision. Criteria need effort to be built.

WHY IS IT A VICIOUS CYCLE?

The chain goes on like that: wrong decisions stand between wrong criteria (the root cause) and wrong initiatives/actions (the result), which in turn lead to wrong conclusions those resulting to new wrong decisions. In fact, (wrong) criteria are prevailing and determinant in all the steps of a decision making cycle.

(Better have a look at my rough diagram above in case my wording is not clear enough.)

In other words, wrong decisions give consistently birth to new wrong decisions. Consistency is crucial for any habit to become permanent culture. Who said that consistency is only positive?

Who is the bearer of the criteria?

THE PEOPLE

Going back to the root cause of wrong decisions, let’s analyze how wrong criteria are shaped up. Criteria are basically the unconscious combination of experience and ability/competence. PEOPLE are the unique bearers of those criteria. We make decisions based on what we have experienced up to now (the less relevant to the situation the more incorrect the decision) and/or on what we know/understand/realize/analyze/foresee.

This latter group of elements does not have to do with our inherent mind capacity (let’s face it: there are no silly people around!), but with our braveness to accept our various “lacks” and our desire to learn more.

I feel blessed to have met a few such people who make lessons learnt a permanent source of additional knowledge in their everyday decision making process. Such people exercise two powerful practices: they understand their limitations and they constantly try to learn more. In this way, they significantly increase the probability to avoid a wrong decision. So, it’s a matter of attitude.

My (common sense) conclusion in…

10 concrete steps to take in order to eliminate wrong decision making

1.    Take it for granted that you WILL make wrong decisions

2.    Realize what you know and what you don’t

3.    Learn, learn, learn

4.    Involve people who DO know in your decision making process

5.    Always start with WHY

6.    Think DEEP

7.    Check the results

8.    Admit your mistakes

9.    Take corrective action the soonest possible

10. Use lessons learnt in your next decision

Decisions are taken every minute. Decisions are concrete choices. We cannot always make correct decisions, but we can work to reduce the number of wrong decisions in favor of the correct ones.

We need to be prepared to make a decision. Never ever make a decision for something you don’t know. Let those who know to do that for you. You can still be useful making your own “field’s” decisions. If you involve ignorant or narrow-minded people in your decision making, you’ll sooner or later find yourself trapped in the undesirable but absolutely foreseeable consequences of the vicious cycle of wrong decision making.

To avoid this threatening cycle we need to involve the correct people per decision.Those who know or are able to understand. Those who realize the limitations of their knowledge and expertise and are open to learn new things, those who are both talented AND ambitious (“either … or” does not work here).

Once again, it is a matter of PEOPLE. Decision making is obviously a matter of PEOPLE. However sophisticated systems we might have in our organization, however strict we are with measuring performance, never ever will systems replace people’s impact on decision making. Systems do not educate people. Systems are used by people. People decide how to use them. Processes do not guide people. People decide how to take advantage of them.

So, PEOPLE come FIRST not just on a principle basis, but also from a very practical point of view.

What do you think?

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*The image accompanying the title (“Sierpinski fractals”) presents the way this talented Polish mathematician proved that ORDER can be created by CHAOS. In my opinion, this is extremely relevant to decision making. People who do not get embarrassed by chaos are capable of coming up with a concrete, most of the times correct, straightforward decision that puts things into order.

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