Decision Making Skill is very important for every sector of your life.Today life is very complex,so every one must have valuable information about decision making process.In This article we will elaborate some universal tips about decision making.
You have comfortable position in a shoe company and are the mother of two girls ages one and four. Unexpectedly, you’re offered a dream job: footwear buyer for a luxury department store. The problem is, you’d have longer hours. An Occasional trips to Pans, plus considerable added responsibility. Are the rewards of this exciting job worth the stress it will bring to your already demanding persona/life?.
You are office manager for a consulting company whose chief source of income is government contracts. Since your staff is small, you use secretaries from a temporary’ agency when the company needs to meet deadlines for bids and proposals. List year you faced so many deadlines that the agency bit was almost twice the cost of hiring a full time secretary. But there’s no way to be sure thIS scenario will be repeated. Should you hire a permanent secretary? or stick with temps?.
If you have trouble making choices or are usually unhappy with your answers, your decision-making style may be the reason. Even if you make decisions with relative case, it pays to examine the process. You’ll save time and emotional energy and arrive at better choices.Start with Clirs simple quiz, hearing in mind that there are no “correct” answers.
Everything You Wanted to Know About decision making skill and Were Too Embarrassed to Ask
THE Inner Voice:
An intuitive decision is the one that draws on instincts and emotions a guess, a gut reaction or a snap judgment— rather than on a logical process. It’s a choice that relies on the unconscious, on the accumulation of past experiences. Intuitive decisions have their merits. “Intuition can handle decisions that aren’t readily broken down into objectively measureable components.
Intuition is quick, but also chancy. You may forget significant factors. There’s a good likelihood you would not reach the m same conclusion. If you j a chance to reconsider. Intuitive decision makers can guard against mistakes by acting slowly.
Narrowing the field:
Another way to make difficult decisions is to use what Shoemaker calls the threshold approach. In which you set minimum standards— thresholds— for what you are willing to accept. With these criteria, you quickly eliminate unsuitable options.When shopping for office space. for example, you make the decision easier by ruling out choices that are t<n» expensive, too small or too far away from your clients. Hut you must be careful not to be overly rigid with this approach. If you place too tight a restriction on geographic location, for instance, you might miss an exceptionally attractive facility a few Works outside your predetermined boundaries.
Analysis THE OPTIONS:
When a decision is complex and you want an objective answer, decision analysis may help. This technique allows you to give each option a numerical value, as if you are a teacher grading your students. You begin your analysis by listing the factors that will influence your choice. For example, if you’re deriding among four job offer you’d probably consider such things as salary, opportunity for advancement and working conditions.
The second step would be to rate each of the job offers. How do you assign a numerical score to something like working conditions? The useful method, says Shoemaker, is to set up a scale. The most congenial job gets 10. the job with the worst conditions gets zero. The rest are scored accordingly.
The final step of decision analysis is adding it all up. The job with the highest overall score is the one that comes closest to meeting your goals. At the initial stage of decision analysis, an expert adviser can help you identify options and issues.Nevertheless, decision analyses is not an all-purpose tod. “Some decisions cannot be broken down this way without los ing something in the process.
Blending Styles:
Can you be thorough without numbers? Intuitive without superficiality? Yes. Many people manage to combine analysis and intuition with great success.Some people ultimately do not trust analysis.” says Shoemaker. “They want
to chew over their decision, get emotionally invoked. The way they cover all aspects of a problem is to discuss their decision with many people.”That approach works well for Helen Chen, president of Joyce Chen, Inc., a
firm that markets gourmet Oriental foods and cookware. “I need to have a gut feeling that a new product will be fabulous.” says Chen.”Yet I have to be systematic, because a mistake could be very costly.” One product her company sells the bamboo cooking utensils. Recently. Chen decided to pack.
TIMING MATTERS
“Every decision has an optimal point in time.“ says Schoemaker. Sometimes there’s an ex- ternary imposed deadline. But often it s your personality rather than a deadline or the nature the choice that determines when a decision is made.Some people like closure, others resist finality. “Recognize your natural inclination and be wary of going too far m that direction. If you have a tendency to make snap judgments, be sure to ask enough questions.
Other people need to set time limits. “I find decisions difficult,” says Helen Chen. “If I didn’t give myself a deadline, then process could go on and on. For the tool- set decision. I allowed myself three weeks.”
some psychologists believe women are more likely than men to postpone decisions. “When you feel that you can control the outcome of events, decisions are easier. Unfortunately, many women have learned to feel helpless, so they are frightened and inhibited in decision- making.
If you find yourself dawdling, take a close look at the situation. Weigh the benefits of deciding against tin costs. Suppose, for instance, that you own a takeout sandwich shop and the space next door becomes vacant. If you jump at opportunity to expand your business, you might overextend yourself, but if you wait, you risk losing out to another tenant. “When people delay a decision, they may not realize that sometimes they are. in fact, making a choice.
Expect the unexpected
One of the best ways to improve your ability to make the right decisions is to always strive to expect the unexpected so that you are ready to respond quickly to any prompt, however unexpected.
Think before you act
This may seem like a superfluous suggestion or it may seem like a way to take time and delay a decision but it seems quite obvious that deciding is not enough and that it is also necessary to decide well.
Developing your analytical skills and taking all the time necessary not only to collect data but also to study them and hypothesize different solutions is a good exercise to speed up the whole process and learn to shorten your reaction times without, however, neglecting a in-depth analysis of every aspect important to the decision to be taken.
Go easy on the assumptions
A key thing to avoid if you want to learn how to make better decisions is to avoid jumping to conclusions right away when we don’t have enough data to build on.
Among other things, in making this mistake, we often associate another one which is to take into account only the premises that seem to support our hypothesis without considering those that could contradict it.
Learn from the past
To improve your decision-making capacity, you can analyze which approach has worked best in the past even if you don’t have to rely only on the past because situations change and what last time turned out to be the right decision may not be anymore.
Learn a systematic approach
To make a good decision, you need to adopt a rigorous approach based on problem solving techniques . This means:
- specify the objectives, i.e. what you want to achieve
- define the criteria for judging whether what we wanted has been achieved or not
- collect and analyze data
- look for causes instead of focusing on symptoms
- develop and test hypotheses and solutions
- choose the best solution based on the objectives to be achieved
Confront someone
Before making an important decision, it is good to talk about it with someone who – due to cultural background, experience and skills – can help us find any weaknesses in the reasoning that led us to choose a certain solution.
Give yourself time to reflect
Often the best decisions are the quick ones, especially in certain contexts, but when we are used to focusing on the problem immediately and we have speeded up the path that will lead us to make our decision, we will have some precious moments that we can devote to further reflection for check if what we thought is logical and has a justification.
Consider all the consequences
Every decision has a consequence and predicting it in advance will help us manage it in the best possible way
How To Handle Every decision making skill Challenge With Ease Using These Tips
Letting GO
Decisions inevitably involve loss; that’s why its often so hard to make them. “By definition, a decision involves taking one thing and giving up something else. When you are poised between the convenient job and the exciting one. both are potentially yours; after you decide, you have just one or the other.
When a decision lias you stymied, a new approach may help. If you’re an off- the-cuff. Intuitive thinker, make a systematic list of pros and cons. If you’re the company specialist in statistical analysis, lock your office door, open the newspaper per and check your horoscope.
The Postmortem
You’ve made up your mind: you’ve acted. Now what? If the decision was a major one. Such as finding a new job. don’t expect to stop wondering about it right away. “If you’ve been looking at job advertisements for a long time, that’s part of your life. it’s hard to let go it immediately. A casual scan of the Help Wanted section is one thing, but lengthy agonizing is another.
Post-decision evaluation is very valuable, but also very hard to do. “People prefer to rationalize their decisions, to look selectively for confirmation that they acted wisely. Sometimes they even distort reality and fail to learn from their mistakes. Worse, they may stick with a bad decision instead of trying to extricate themselves. Try’ to set goals tint will help you evaluate your decision.
