Decision-making is a process, not an event
Many people think that decisions, once made, can move right into some sort of action phase. Good luck with that, as they say. This might work in a static world but our world is rarely if ever static. Things change incessantly, often well beyond our ability to control or even influence to any useful degree.
This fact of life can be quite frustrating to those action-oriented folks who like to “… decide and then get on with it”. Life doesn’t work that way.
The world moves along every day, doing its own thing. It doesn’t consult anyone despite regular efforts by some folks to control things. Sometimes things go favorably for us, while at other times things seem to go seriously against us. What seems to work one day may work not at all or even badly for us the next day. We are rarely in control of what happens each day except locally and to a small degree.
For us normal folk, this means that our decisions are so often strongly time-dependent. What may appear to be a sound practical decision today could easily become a weak, ineffective, or harmful decision tomorrow. How can we possibly decide anything in a world that might invalidate it rather quickly?
Making our decisions dynamic
Pretty clearly, our decisions must be designed to work in a changing world. Many of the changes we will encounter cannot be predicted. A “good” decision today may turn into being a “bad” decision as our situation evolves. But how can we possibly make a decision that can accommodate whatever may happen down the road a bit?
One common approach is to design the decision so as to accommodate a range of likely scenarios. This can work so long as our scenarios truly reflect the range of what our decision situation future may become. Such an approach works pretty well in a relatively static world. In our currently fast-changing, largely unpredictable world however, scenario planning like this rarely works as well as we need.
If we can’t predict our future to any reliable degree, we must build some sort of change-detecting and change-handling mechanisms into our decision-making. This makes decision-making not an event but instead a process.
What is a “decision-making process”?
In practical terms, it is a process that involves both keeping a close watch on critical elements of our decision situation and adjusting our decision and its actions accordingly. This means that our decision-making efforts for any given situation must continue for as long as the situation requiring our decision persists. Only when the driving situation has effectively resolved itself one way or another – so that we no longer have to be concerned about it personally – can our decision-making process conclude.
Of course, this process aspect is generally rather inconvenient for anyone who is the slightest bit action-oriented. As most of us are to at least some degree. We want to decide-and-be-done-with-it … yes? Well, that unfortunately is not how our world works. Especially today.
While we may hope that most of our decision-situations will be slow-moving or even static, this happy state of affairs is becoming less and less likely. We are consequently obliged to assume that our decision situation is going to change appreciably before it is somehow resolved. If we have a situation that seems to have resolved itself rather quickly, then we are fortunate. The next decision situation we face may not be anywhere near as cooperative.
Decision-making as a process is not something we learn in school. For most of us folks, it is something that we may never even realize its need or any effective ways to deal with it.
I’ll get into this vital aspect of decision-making in our fast-changing world in the next few posts. A decision-making process is not all that hard to do – but only if you know how to do it right.
