Making the Best Decisions

In light of this week’s Presidential election, I thought I’d distill wisdom about how to make the best decision possible. I realize that this might be too late to help you with your decision on who should lead our country for the next four years, however, the President is not likely to the influence most of the decisions you’ll make for the next four years. So, this week’s wisdom will you serve you well regardless of whether you’ve voted or not, or who is the President. Furthermore, as I seek to do on my blog, you can apply this wisdom to almost every area of your life. To help me distill this wisdom, I’ll be leverage the insights of Dan and Chip Heath in their book, Decisive.

Each day, I’ll tackle one of the four villains of decision-making and how to counter those villains. Today, however, I wanted to briefly share what those four villains are, for two reasons. First, I want to tease you so that you’ll return tomorrow. Second, I want to prep your mind for any major decision you might be tempted to make today in hopes that you’ll hold off until tomorrow. So, here are the four villains:

1. Define choices too narrowly-Typically, this manifests in an “either/or” scenario or what more sophisticated people call binary terms. The irony of this villain is that when it comes to the most important decision for Americans this week (voting for President), we’re often presented with only two options. Tomorrow, we’ll explore why this is potentially dangerous for making the most important decisions.
2. Confirmation Bias-Confirmation bias occurs when we have an initial belief about something, and then we seek out information that confirms our belief. Dan Lovallo, said, “When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted themes, we’ll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision.” We will distill this further on Wednesday.
3. Short-term emotion-We often make poor decisions because we’re paying attention to the emotion or feelings in the moment. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all else.” The heart or seat of emotions will complicate decision making because we tend to be impulsive and feeling-oriented with decision-making. On Thursday, I’ll share a recent poor decision made by a man for whom I was providing counsel.
4. Overconfidence-We think we know more about the future than we actually do. If I asked you all the times you were wrong about the future, I’m pretty sure that list would be long, and I’m pretty sure it would shock you. So, maybe that’s something you should today: make a list of all the times you thought you were right, but were wrong. Just kidding. I don’t want to ruin your day.

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