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LIMITED-TIME
BONUS! Practical NLP, by Arman Darini,
Ph.D.
Enjoy reading this
sample online Tip:
Extraordinary Decision Making
by Arman Darini, Ph.D.
September 25, 2006
All right, good to be talking with you again. Today we'll
take a deep dive inside THE single most important ability
you have as a human being. If you are poor in this area,
then... well, it's rough to be you. And if you excel at it,
then the whole world is at your fingertips. However, even if
you excel at it, I know that you are not nearly as good as
you can be. How come I know?
Because all of us without exception (ok, maybe there are
a few extraordinary individuals out there) were NOT taught
this ability. We picked it up at random in the childhood, by
watching adults, who in their turn picked it up at random in
their childhood, ad infinum. Somewhere at the beginning of
this great ancestral chain is a not-so-smart monkey, if you
catch my drift.
So you have more chances of winning a lottery - twice,
than being really good at it right now. But, I *know* from
years of training experience, that you CAN become
*amazingly* good at it. With results so far reaching and
important for your life, that your grand grandma will wake
up and hug me for teaching you this skill.
"Enough of pulling my leg. WHAT IS IT?"
*Drum roll* Decisions, decisions, decisions. How well (or
how badly) you make decisions. Not any specific decision,
but how good is your *process* of deciding. Bet you never
even thought about that!
During the last 100 years, psychologists have studied how
people make decisions. How great generals do it, how Olympic
champions do it, how house moms with ten kids do it, how
lonely priests do it. The results are inspiring.
They (psychologists) have figured out the structure of
extraordinary decision making AND the most common
psychological traps all of us fall into. I will talk about
some of the most frequent traps that your mind stumbles in
(trust us, it does - hundreds of experiments have verified
this) in the next article. Today we are taking a closer look
at the structure of extraordinary decision making.
The structure is the sequence of steps you must follow to
get the result you want. If you skip or change the steps,
you get different results. If you mess up excellent decision
making steps, you get messed up results. Of course, once you
become an excellent decision maker, you can be more creative
with the steps, but until then it pays to follow what those
people do who are already amazing at it.
There are three steps to extraordinary decision making:
1) Frame the problem. 2) Collect information. 3) Draw
conclusions.
Let's look at each of these steps in detail:
- First, you frame the problem by asking a specific
question that you want answered: Do I want Chinese or
Italian today? How do I double my salary? Where can I
find the love of my life? That question forms the frame
for the decision, because it highlights some aspects of
the problem while pushing others into the shadow. EVERY
question that you can possibly ask will focus your
attention on one thing and hide another thing. For
example, I might have also liked to get some sushi, but
that alternative is outside the frame. It might be just
as easily possible to triple my salary, but that's
outside the frame. Maybe instead of searching for my
love, it's better to wait and have her find me, but
that's outside the frame as well.
The moment you frame the problem, you delete chunks of
reality from the consideration. So be careful what you
delete. Way too often the initial decision frame crops
the best alternatives out. Examine a few decisions you
made recently - how much time did you spend on framing
the problem? It should be 5-20% of the total decision
making time.
- Second, you collect information that you don't
already know. And this is key. What you think you don't
know and what you actually don't know are light years
apart. Time and time again, experiments have confirmed
that we are GROSSLY overconfident in our knowledge (we
don't have the time or the inclination to do it here,
but at our trainings we demonstrate that fact to you
beyond any doubt - it's highly worth having this etched
into your mind).
The single best strategy to avoid overconfidence (let's
not confuse confidence with competence here) is to ask
disconfirming questions. You are probably used to asking
questions that confirm your intuitions and beliefs. You
need to do just the opposite - ask questions that
disconfirm your opinions. For example, suppose one of
your alternatives for doubling the salary is to get a
second job. A confirming question would be: “How will
getting a second job double my salary?” A disconfirming
question would be: ‘How can getting a second job fail to
double my salary?” Think of it as playing the devil’s
advocate with your decision alternatives. Only then you
can make sure you have got solid, high quality
information essential for extraordinary decision making.
- Third, you take all the information and the decision
objectives, and make the best conclusion. How you come
to the conclusion is important. Some people flip coins,
others hesitate until they grow so frustrated they latch
onto the first conclusion they see. Yet others trust
their intuition, and a few even apply linear models
(weighing pros and cons). None of these is the best all
the time, each has its own uses. I personally would flip
a coin to decide on the restaurant, weigh pros and cons
to triple my salary, and trust my intuition to find the
love of my life (don't try this last one yet - intuition
CAN be an incredible tool, but you have to develop it
first, lest it gets confused with inner chat). What's
important is that you are aware of the method you use to
draw conclusions, and know when to use it and when to
switch to something more effective.
So there you have it, extraordinary decision making in a
nutshell. Of course, to master it you need a few more
details. And lots of practice, the opportunity for which,
luckily, happens several hundred times a day.
