Decision Making
Rethinking the approach for the future.
We all make decisions. I for my part, would like to think I have a good amount of experience in decision making. After all I’ve been in the industry for nearly 19 years, and the biggest reason of all is I’m a dad of a 10yr old.
Tons of books have been written, eons worth lectures have been given, on this topic. After all this is the hardest thing a human does.
Decisions are hard, patterns are easy to follow. We humans love to follow patterns, that is why the service industry works so well. Somebody has thought up about a large scale process which needs to decisions other than follow a flow-charted process.
But in the last few days I’ve come to thinking of decision making differently. Courtesy to my boss and daughter, I know a strange combination
Let us start with my boss. I have a wonderful boss (really !). A few days ago when we had to setup a new organization + team, he laid down a very simple rule. Diversity. Simple word hard to do. I thought diversity just meant gender, however his rule also extended into geography/ethnicity. His second rule was do what is common sense, do what is right, rather than trying and inventing a unique process/approach.
Now to my daughter. I was having a conversation with her. She asked me “Dad what is being corrupt ?” I was thinking of a way of explaining this to her in a simple way. I asked her “Let us say you want to hurt me, how would you decide to hurt me or not ?” Her answer intrigued me, she said “First I would see as a person(read human), what you have done, and if I hurt you what would be the effect on me as well as you, second I would see if it makes sense (read common sense) to hurt you”. The conversation went on to discussing when these 2 things are changed by other by coercion, that is corruption.
Anyway I digress.
So if you see these 2 instances, both of them have used 2 filters to make decisions
- Human Filter
- Common Sense Filter
In both the cases, they applied a human filter to see how others and themselves would be affected. In the case of the organization, the decision to be diverse affected us in big way as having people from different nations, helping bridge communications in crisis moments (medical emergencies) in the team.
The common sense filter is harder, as someone said “Common sense is not common”. the ability to distill the problem to it’s fundamental units and think upward with common sense is hard and taxing for the brain. Another example was, when we did not have a assigned space to run a 2 month training program, sheer common sense of looking a cafeteria as a space, helped us. We converted a cafeteria into a classroom, in a week and were up and running.
But if these 2 filters are used in that order, human and common sense, you would arrive as what Sherlock Holmes would say “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,however improbable, must be the truth”.
Which in our case is our decision.
Why is this approach relevant for this day and age? We have turned to decision making as a witch art. We hire the best CEO’s, we hire consulting agencies, we seek external validation. When all we need to do is use the 2 filters on any problem. The solution emerges by itself.
Decision is made.
