Decisions

Decision making is an essential leadership skill. If you can learn how to make timely, well-considered decisions, then you can lead your team to well-deserved success. If, however, you make poor decisions, your time as a leader will be brutally short. To determine what leads people to make bad decisions, it's helpful to consider what we would need to create the ideal decision-making environment. Most theories on decision-making are based on what the rational decision maker will do when faced with perfect information, including a complete and total knowledge of all possible outcomes with absolutely no uncertainty.In the real world, we know that the information available to us is rarely perfect or complete, and that we can predict very little about our choice' consequences until we actually make them. Although these two factors alone are enough to explain a few bad decisions, perhaps the biggest reason for our poor choices lies in the fact that most human behavior is simply not rational.This is an experiential or emotional filter that may often times have no current underpinning of hard analytical support. That said, in absence of other decisioning filters it can sometimes be all a person has to go on when making a decision. Even when more refined analytics are available, your instincts can often provide a very valuable gut check against the reasonability or bias of other inputs. The big take away here is that intuitive decisioning can be refined and improved.The truth is, everybody uses judgment every day in the decision making process. It just gets complicated when other people evaluate that judgment. Whether it was good judgment or bad judgement depends on who you ask. Most of the time, we make these choices without thinking. For small, routine choices such as how to respond when your friend starts a conversation with you, you do not need to think. You have learned how to talk and how to behave in a friendly way without thinking at all, and your habits serve you