MPowerment Matters

Decision Making

May 2007

Decision-making is one of the key areas in which leaders must excel in order to be successful. Multiple options are often present, and how leaders process the available information and act on it is critical in arriving at sound decisions.

Landscapes change with the speed of light these days and quick reaction time is often required. Leaders need to make wise decisions, often before all or even most of the facts are in. The thought process must be sound to create the highest probability for success

Business executives, lawyers and doctors, among others, are often caught in situations where decisions need to be virtually instantaneous. Their critical thinking skills must be honed so they can grasp a situation and make a timely determination of how to proceed. In order to do this successfully on a consistent basis, their thought process has to be grounded in sound principles.

Three disparate sources brought this concept to my mind this past week. I was coaching a client using the classic book, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. I just finished reading a new book, How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman, MD. And lastly, in a recent discussion a colleague brought up "the ladder of inference", a concept initially described by Chris Argyris, but made more famous by Peter Senge of M.I.T. With all of these references floating around in my brain, it hit me that they were all talking about the same concepts, albeit in a different manner. They all relate to how we process information to arrive at decisions

The Four Agreements Applied to Thinking

Don Miguel Ruiz, the Toltec nagual (master) has written a book for the ages in The Four Agreements. I have written about it in previous articles. The two agreements relevant to this discussion are very simple. One is "Don't take anything personally" and the other is "Don't make assumptions."

"Don't take anything personally" is important because, as Ruiz says, taking things personally causes you to be trapped in personal importance. "It is the maximum expression of selfishness, because we make the assumption that everything is about me." His view is that nothing other people do is because of you but is because of themselves. By taking someone else's words or actions personally, we make an assumption that they know what is going on with us and we actually try to impose "our world on their world."

The result is that "When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something small because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong."

In other words, when you take things personally, you are processing information one way based upon a fallacious belief, and you may arrive at a wrong conclusion and then take the wrong action.

"Don't make assumptions" is equally relevant to our critical thinking and decision-making. The biggest problem with making assumptions is that the person making them tends to believe they are the truth. When we make assumptions about what other people are doing or thinking, we then violate the previous agreement by taking things personally. Then we end up by blaming the other people and react accordingly.

Refusing to assume is difficult. The best way to do that is to constantly clarify by asking questions. As Ruiz says, "Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be, and even then do not assume you know all there is to know about a given situation. Once you hear the answer, you will not have to make assumptions because you will know the truth."

In his own way, Don Miguel is telling us to remain as objective as possible and not impose our personal thoughts and biases into our decisions. Let the facts speak for themselves. But, there are so many facts, so much data to look at.

The Ladder of Inference

Both the "Ladder of Inference" from Chris Argyris in Overcoming Organizational Defenses and later, Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline addresses this.

It is a metaphor designed to illustrate how we can quickly jump to conclusions by examining only some of the data. The suggestion is that it is like climbing a ladder in your mind -- starting at the bottom with all of the observable real data and experience (everything that would be captured by a video camera); quickly using only selective data; applying a meaning to it to make assumptions; and then drawing conclusions. Once we have reached these conclusions, they become part of our belief system and we take action based upon them.

So, the next question is whether this is bad. We need a way to process information and arrive at conclusions in an efficient and timely manner. Climbing this ladder is a way to do that. We just need to be aware that it is easy to lose track of the origin of our attitudes, since the original data is long lost.

In order to stay in touch with external reality, people using the ladder of inference need to spend time reflecting (becoming more aware of their own thought process and reasoning), advocating (making their thought process and reasoning more visible and understandable to others), and inquiring (digging into the thinking and reasoning of others).

How Doctors Think

Lastly, Jerome Groopman, MD, writing in How Doctors Think, talks about how doctors reason when attempting to make a diagnosis, and how it sometimes leads to good results and other times causes the physicians to fail to consider certain options. He insists doctors need to take shortcuts (heuristics) as a response to uncertainty and urgency. He argues that they must, however, be employed at an "optimal emotional temperature." The most common shortcuts he defines include:

• Pattern recognition -- an immediacy of perception
  
• Representativeness error: thinking is guided by a prototype, so you fail to consider possibilities that contradict the prototype and thus attribute the symptoms to the wrong cause
  
• Attribution error occurs when patients fit a negative stereotype
  
• Cognitive bias: confirmation bias. This is a fallacy involving confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information
  
• Affective error occurs when we value too highly information that fulfills our desire. It resembles confirmation bias in selectively surveying the data
  
• Availability means the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind