Decision making is a very important aspect in all spheres of our life; be it business, academics, profession, personal life etc. Given the nature of Indian society, our decisions naturally get altered based on our surroundings, upbringing and more importantly our past experience.
I read the below article in my favorite news paper The Hindu Businessline, which succinctly describes all these factors which we consider in the decision making process. The crux of the article is, while it is good to have rich experience in framing a decision, it is equally important to focus on the process. Time, people and situations change. We must learn from the past and alter the process based on the current environment. I always believe, in any life game, the rules or the processes which added value to you or to the society a few years ago might not necessarily add value now. Therefore, it is necessary to learn our lessons hard and correct ourself.
Since, I keep a lot of interest in politics, I hope Modiji our PM reads this article and understands that whatever worked in past might not necessarily work in future.
Here's the article from the hindu businessline.
What worked in the past may not work in the future unless we focus on the process.
We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We interpret the past – what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told – to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.
It could also be a mistake.
Experience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser.
The problem is that we view the past through numerous filters that distort our perceptions. As a result, our interpretations of experience are biased, and the judgments and decisions we base on those interpretations can be misguided.
If our goal is to improve decision-making, we can use our knowledge of those filters to understand just what our experience has to teach us and learn how to overcome our biases.
We focus on what we can see
In the business environment, the outcomes of decisions are highly visible, readily available for us to observe and judge. But the details of the decision process, which we can control far more than the result, typically don’t catch our attention. If the aim is to learn from experience – mistakes as well as successes – acknowledging that process is crucial.
Circle of advisers
Honest feedback – an unbiased, undistorted assessment of one’s experience – is essential for improving decisions. Yet decision makers are often surrounded by individuals who have incentives to feed them censored and self-serving information – and these people are not necessarily a crowd of yes-men.
Overvaluing experience
We can’t place all the blame for our distorted view of the world on the environment and our inner circle. Some of the blame lies with us. We tend to search for and use evidence that confirms our beliefs and hypotheses, and we gloss over or ignore information that contradicts them – an exercise of selectively building and interpreting experience known as the confirmation bias.
How not to be fooled
The following techniques can uncover the real lessons experience offers and help you base decisions on a clearer view of the world.
Sample failure: Failures and the processes that lead to them are doomed to stay in the dark unless special occasions are created to bring them to light. To identify what could be done better in the future, companies can also conduct decision post-mortems to analyse underlying processes.
Don’t miss near misses: Another oft-ignored event is the near miss – a failure that’s disguised as a success, but only because there are generally no dire consequences.
Pursue prevention: Recognising a potential problem requires a different approach than solving an actual problem. One strategy is to harness employees’ collective talents by allowing people to raise concerns about the firm’s operations. Disagree: As Peter Drucker wrote, “The first rule in decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.” To devise healthy strategies, executives need to hear many perspectives.
Disconfirm: Rather than finding clues that corroborate your hunch – all too easy in an information-rich world – start by asking yourself how you could know you were, in fact, wrong.
Source: Experience is not always wisdom
