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The choice that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line. To be a truly wise decision maker, you have to adopt counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but highly profitable techniques to avoid business disasters by making the best decisions.
To address unconscious cognitive biases in your workplace, you need to evaluate thoroughly their impact on your own professional activities, as well as more broadly in your team and organization, and make and implement a plan to address the problem.
How to make decisions quickly? Answer 5 key questions: 1) What key info do I need? 2) What cognitive biases might harm me? 3) What would a trusted adviser say? 4) How might this fail? 5) Why might I revise this decision?
8-step decision-making process: 1) Identify need for decision; 2) Get relevant info; 3) Decide goals; 4) Develop criteria; 5) Generate a few viable options; 6) Weigh options; 7) Implement decision; 8) Revise implementation and decision as needed.
Effective leadership decision making on tough decisions involves: 1) Deciding the criteria you’ll use to chose; 2) Ranking the importance of these criteria; 3) Grading your choices using the criteria; 4) Checking your grading with your head and gut; 5) Sticking to your top choice.
To prevent failure in implementing decisions, or in managing projects or processes, imagine that it completely failed. Then, brainstorm all plausible reasons for failure, and generate solutions to these potential problems. Integrate these solutions into your project or process.
To maximize project or process success, envision that it succeeded spectacularly. Brainstorm likely reasons for such success, and generate strategies that would lead to such success. Integrate these strategies into your project or process.
Effective strategic planning involves: 1) Identifying potential threats and opportunities; 2) Planning how to deal with them; 3) Reserving sufficient resources to address threats and opportunities; 4) Making your plans resilient and flexible.
To avoid decision disasters and defeat cognitive biases, develop the 12 critical skills that cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics show are needed for mental fitness.
Avoid Decision Disasters
Protect yourself from decision disasters by getting our free Wise Decision Maker Course, which includes 8 weekly video-based modules. As a bonus, you'll receive a free copy of our Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace when you sign up.
