Skip to main content

Rational Decision-Making

I've been going through some of my old notes and decided to pull a couple of them together for another post. Decision making is an interesting subject, something that applies to all spheres of our lives - from everyday decision making, to economics, politics, etc. In some cases it is desirable to delay making decisions as long as possible - "I've learned one thing in politics. You don't make a decision until you have to" (Margaret Thatcher); in some we need to make decisions quickly - the rapid-fire decisions that make up our daily lives. Sometimes we need to rely on intuition and instinct, sometimes it is necessary to carefully consider and weigh a complex set of inputs and variables. But regardless of the circumstances we can benefit from getting rid of myths surrounding decision making and becoming more aware of the inner processes we use to make those decisions. For example, the following article from the Harvard Magazine: "The Marketplace of Perceptions" tackles the myth of purely rational decision-making:
"Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist."
As far as gaining awareness, I really like the book by Garry Kasparov - "How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom", it is not a guide or a self-help manual, but it has some great material:
"You must become conscious of your decision-making processes, and with practice they will improve your intuitive - unconscious - performance. This is required because as adults we have already formed our patterns, good and bad. To correct the bad and enhance the good you must take an active role in becoming more self-aware... Awareness can mean the difference between a harmless habit and a bias that leads to a dangerous loss of objectivity."    
I also moved the following short video from the "Life As A Game Or The Game Of Life" post as I think it makes more sense here. It also suggests that most of the time we are far from being rational and logical:




To round things up, here's a quick quote from Chris Curran's (CTO of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants) blog to highlight the importance of good decision making:
"Projects with the poorest outcomes came out that way not by surprise, but after a series of interim decision points during which leadership reviewed the major project issues and alternative courses of action, and selected one course they thought would best right the ship."
So, get a hold of your decision making processes, understand and analyze them, manage your biases to improve objectivity, combat your weaknesses and empower your strengths, allow your mind to wonder and let creativity flourish, exercise your intuition, and don't be afraid to fail. Learn and train yourself to make better decisions! 

Comments

  1. If you’re traveling in considered one of these countries and you’re having bother accessing the service, ought to use|you must use} a VPN to switch your location to your own home} country. IPVanish boasts wonderful security, utilizing 256-bit encryption and perfect forward secrecy to maintain your connection safe. A built-in kill change provides an extra layer of protection by stopping all data switch ought to the VPN connection drop. It provides DNS leak protection and doesn’t monitor any searching activity or 토토사이트 maintain connection logs. In case of questions or issues, you've have} access to 24/7 stay chat support. IPVanish Fast and dependable service with good safe servers and apps.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter  coverage , or all of these and few other things put together.  But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the  world of oral culture;  to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to  further developments of abstraction,  symbolic logic,  and mathematics; to  the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book justice. So, I would simply s

Alan Mathison Turing

Update (11/23/2013): " Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon." ( http://usat.ly/19bLZET ) Long overdue!!! With academic background in applied mathematics and computer science and years of experience in Information Technology it would be incredibly surprising if I didn't know of Alan Turing, or so I thought. Sure, I knew who he was and had a good idea of what he had contributed to the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and of course computer science, which he basically founded; and things like Turing Machine, Turing Test, and Enigma Code-breaking have been widely popularized. I also knew that he died relatively young, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding his premature death. That is until I read the following in the book titled  "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: "Turing's hom

Free to Choose

A while back I have written a post about two popular books by Nobel Prize-winning economist   Milton Freidman . Books that had, through their  undeniable logic, a  profound and lasting effect on my  socioeconomic and political views: Now, through the digital powers of social networking the legendary 10-part PBS TV series "Free to Choose" (1980), based on the book of the same name, is available on YouTube. Yes, one would be committing about 10 hours of one's life to watch through all of these; but, in my opinion, this would be time well spent. So, enjoy -  " Free to Choose ".