When considering highly successful people, we often attribute their success, at least in part, to their decision making. What decision making skills can help people make better choices? Is making better choices a talent, or is decision making skill something that can be learned and improved?
Given the thousands of decisions we make every day, all having consequences that can create positive or negative results, skills to improve this capability might be considered fundamental to a productive life. Learning decision skills provides the opportunity to increase positive outcomes while decreasing the consequences of failure that are part of the learning process.
Decision making skills should accelerate gaining knowledge that will make our choices more effective. Our decision making model helps us to identify information and abilities important to choosing. Skills include:
Problem solving and decision making are closely related, making many problem solving skills helpful to the decision making process. Critical thinking and systems thinking are also strongly linked to decision making, with significant overlap in competencies.
Choices we make every day present us with daily opportunity to improve our skill in making decisions. Many of these choices are made out of habit, but just bringing these selections to a conscious level can enable evaluation, analysis, and self reflection that can be used to improve these and other decisions.
Certainly, improving decision skills will come from the learning gained from experiencing the consequences of making poor decisions. However, for high value decisions with significant consequences, we would like to have developed these skills in advance in order to avoid disastrous outcomes to the extent possible. The goal would be to improve our decision making skills in an environment where the risk of significant negative consequences that come from poor choice is reduced or eliminated.
Decision making games provides one such environment, providing the opportunity to develop skill with exploration, projecting likely outcomes based on probabilities, as well as developing strategic abilities. Simulations can provide emotional decision making experiences that enable improved coping. They can also help address one of the challenges with complex decision making problems: projecting the longer term consequences of our choices.
As with all skills, learning to make better choices comes from seeing, listening and doing. They improve with study, counsel, coaching, and practice. Prioritizing learning or choosing of core values can aid decision makers by providing an early and enduring assessment framework for future decision making.
This presents one of the other difficulties with developing competence in decision making. Good or bad outcomes do not necessarily imply good or bad decision making. Except for cases where clear and direct causation can be established, decision results are influenced by random circumstances, unforeseeable events, and imperfect knowledge. With decision timelines that extend beyond a few years, it becomes apparent that even waiting for the effects of a decision may make assessment of improving skills problematic.
Some indications that can suggest continuing skills improvement include:
Decisions define our future. They often come in a series of connected decisions and encourage us to think about what will come next. Decision making skills cross all disciplines and are transferrable to any job, career, or vocation. A focus on these fundamental skills should be considered essential to any meaningful education.
We make thousands of decisions a day. Making a choice is easy. Choosing well takes knowledge and skill.