“What is the mother of any action? What determines what we become and which path we choose in life? It is our decisions.”
(Anthony Robbins)
This concept seems so obvious, but it is the decisions we make, the way we make them and the result of our decisions to trace our route, both in our professional and private life.
The underlying concept is that of decision making.
This expression has become an international term widely used in psychology, medicine, economics, and entrepreneurship.
What is decision making? What does it mean and which features does it have?
The notion of decision making
Decision making is a complex process that leads an individual or a group of people to making a particular choice and involves cognitive and emotional aspects.
Each of us continuously makes a choice or a decision.
We do it at work, preferring a particular operational strategy to another one. We constantly choose between various options in our every-day life and personal relationships.
We do not focus on most decisions as they seem mechanical.
The situation changes when every-day decisions are supposed to solve an important problem. In this case the process of decision making is conscious and requires reflection and analysis.
Let’s have a closer look.
Factors that influence decision making
Multiple factors influence the process of making decisions. Decision making is influenced by individual convictions, the context, the society, and the level of stress. However, our emotions also play a crucial role.
Our emotional and mental background determine the beginning of the decision-making process. Psychology and neurology have a particular bearing on decision making. Emotions impact individual decisions to a large extent and may even alter the physiological characteristics of the brain.
External factors, such as habits and the context, play an equally important role.
Our decisions are determined by an established way of thinking that is hard to alter as it is based on exiting mental schemes. It goes without saying that if our habits are positive and efficient, every-day decision making becomes a simple task. In contrast, if these mechanisms are negative, we fall victim to these pre-existing schemes that constitute an obstacle for our brain.
Knowing the mechanism of decision making is of fundamental importance when it comes to overcoming the force of habit that influences our mental activity.
The context and the society are of equal importance when making decisions. The sense of belonging to a group is one of the major ancestral feelings of a human being. Our decisions are greatly influenced social opinions.
This is one of the main factors that makes a huge impact on individual decisions in our social life.
The presence of multiple and varied factors makes decisions making a valid subject of phycological, engineering, economic and statistical research. Not only these scientific disciplines are interested in decision making, but they themselves become a subject of study. In fact, decision making plays a crucial role in medicine and politics.
Phases of decision making
Decision making is complex and comprises multiple variables. While most every-day choices can be considered emotional and spontaneous, a decision-making process must confront various data and estimate several different scenarios to elaborate a decision.
These are the main phases of decision making:
- Identifying a problem;
- Collecting useful and relevant data regarding the problem;
- Setting priorities and defining goals;
- Identifying possible alternatives;
- Assessing the consequences of various alternatives;
- Decision-making;
- Defining an action plan of the decision implementation;
- Evaluating results and identifying the notions that would be useful for future decisions.
Still, based on the initial emotional and social condition of the decision maker, we can identify three categories of decisions:
- Decisions made in the situation of certainty when a person possesses underpinning data and is aware of the characteristics of the situation;
- Risky decisions, when the person is only aware of potential consequences of their decision;
- Decisions made in the situation of uncertainty when the person does not possess any relevant data.
Decision-making methods
The main decision-making methods fall into two main categories, namely individual and group ones.
Individual decision making concerns a single person.
Group decision making is a process that concerns a team or a working group.
Some of the most common decision-making methods are Protagoras, a classical method that compares two opposing claims, both of which are true, in order to identify the best option, the methods of Consensus, majority and Delphi methods applied to group decision making.
There are also analytical and structural methods, such as MSDA and MCDM, that support the decision maker when making particularly complex decisions.
The process of making decisions has become a major factor in the corporate and professional sectors. Entrepreneurs and marketeers face crucial choices that can determine the success of a business. Another fundamental aspect is that related to developing forecasting models, especially for certain kinds of problems, like investment decisions.
The new frontier is represented by automation of decision-making processes with the help of algorithms and augmented intelligence technologies along with behavioural sciences. Butterfly has designed decision-making software applied to group decisions to optimise the whole procedure.
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