DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Misleading experiences, misleading prejudgements, inappropriate self-interest and inappropriate attachments are four root causes of errors in thinking that lead to bad decisions.

Do you make good decisions?  What influencers affect your decision making?  What happens in the brain when we make a decision?

Our brains use two processes that enable us to cope with the complexities we face: pattern recognition and emotional tagging.  Both help us to make excellent decisions most of the time, but in certain conditions they can mislead us.

Pattern Recognition helps us to assess inputs we receive.  An integrated function then takes the signals about what matches have been found, makes assumptions about missing bits of information and arrives at a point of view.

If we are faced with unfamiliar inputs - especially if the unfamiliar inputs appear familiar - we can think we recognize something when we don not.  We refer to this as the problem of misleading experiences.  Our brains may contain memories of past experiences that connect with inputs we are receiving.  Unfortunately, the past experiences are not a good match with the current situation and hence mislead us.

Another exception is when our thinking has been primed before we receive the inputs, by, for example, previous judgements or decisions we have made that connect with the current situation.  If these judgements are inappropriate for the current situation, they disrupt our pattern recognition processes, causing us to misjudge the information we are receiving.  We refer to these as misleading prejudgements.

In other words, our pattern recognition process is fallible.

The second process that helps us cope with complexity is emotional tagging.  These tags, when triggered by a pattern recognition match, tell us whether to pay attention to something or ignore it, and they give us an action orientation.  Emotional tags can be a problem for us in four ways.  The first two are about misleading experiences and misleading prejudgements: emotions attached to these experiences or prejudgements can give them more prominence in our thinking than is appropriate.

The third and fourth ways emotional tags can disrupt our thinking are through inappropriate attachments, such as the attachment we might feel to colleagues when considering whether to cut costs, and the much more familiar inappropriate self interest, which lies behind the attention managers give to aligning incentives.

The leader must employ processes to mitigate red flags.  Stay tuned for decision checklist and framework.