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Why Your Decision Making is Less Conscious Than You Would Prefer to Think
Humans are complex. Working with complex conditions successfully means making decisions with a greater appreciation for being human. #humility
In a garden in Ojai, California, in the summer of 2013, a 20-something traveller asked: “If you were to boil decision-making down to one thing, what would it be?”
In a word: Self-Awareness
A year later, Decision Making for Dummies was published. Not surprisingly out of twenty-two chapters, more than half address the inner growth opportunity of making good and bad decisions. In today’s world, there is a strong belief in the human intellect, and a stronger more rigidly held belief in business that decisions are rational as if rational were better than emotional, or intuitive. The evidence doesn’t support that conclusion. If it did, Kodak would never have gone bankrupt, Wells Fargo would not have sabotaged its reputation or the health of employees, and we would not be looking for another planet to inhabit.
True. Self-awareness doesn’t help you much where bias is concerned except to know where you may be responding to bias. The quest to develop bias-free AI is a testimony to that particular challenge. Our worst decisions are a by-product of intellectual distortions combined with a failure to use emotions as data or consider the impact on the health of people, society and ecological and systems. Human brains receive emotional data directly from the body and heart. Demonizing human emotions ignores what sets us apart from robots. So far.
Why is a rational approach naive at best?
#1 Human psychology: Hidden biases that operate under the waterline of consciousness number roughly 150 though I have seen various estimates. The Neuroleadership Institute has distilled them down into five groups in their SEEDS model. We’ve mapped biases, organized them, occasionally acknowledge them and some even assume we can eliminate them. However, as neuroscientist David Rock put it: “If you have a brain, you are biased.”
What you can do is:
* Design for each group of biases in the decision-making process
* Create better conditions for decision making in the workplace by…
• Minimizing stress…
