will help you see that the decision-making process leads to sound plans and youwill have logical reasons why you decided upon the educational and careerobjectives that you did.The Need for Better Decision-making:Few people today would doubt the importance of relevant information when makingvital decisions. Yet many people are unaware of the need for a logical approach tothe decision itself. They consider it sufficient to collect data, analyze thedata, and then simply “think hard” in order to arrive at a good decision. They useseat of the pants approaches or simplistic strategies for analyzing theirdecisions. In his book, Crucial Decisions, Irving Janis provided evidence that “Apoor-quality decision-making process (which characterizes simplistic strategies)is more likely than a high-quality process to lead to undesirable outcomes(including disastrous fiascoes).” He asserted “When all vital decisions are madeon the basis of a simplistic strategy, the gross misperceptions andmiscalculations that remain uncorrected are likely to lead to disaster sooner orlater — usually sooner rather than later.”3 There are some who have alreadyrecognized the need for what Janis called vigilant decision-making. Janis stated:“When executives are asked how they go about making the most consequentialdecisions, some of them acknowledge that when they believe the stakes are reallyvery high, they do not stick to the seat-of-the pants approach that theyordinarily use in daily decision-making. In fact, their accounts of what they doin such circumstances are not very different from the analytic problem-solvingapproach recommended in most standard textbooks in management sciences.” One ofthe difficulties in using the analytical problem solving approaches found inmanagement science textbooks, however, is that they are predominantly quantitativeapproaches — incapable of incorporating the qualitative factors so important invital decisions. We will, in this book, look at and resolve the quandary posed bythe need to synthesize quantitative and qualitative factors in a decision process.Decision-making is undoubtedly the most difficult and most essential task amanager performs4. Executives rate decision-making ability as the most importantbusiness skill, but few people have the training they need to make good decisionsconsistently.Some of these techniques are counter intuitive and therefore extremely difficultto learn by trial and error. Experienced golfers love to watch athletic baseballplayers’ step up to the tee and swing as hard as they can, only to miss the ballcompletely. A golf instructor can quickly teach the athletic baseball player whatis not intuitive — that the left arm (for a right-hander) should be kept almoststraight, unlike during a baseball swing, and that swinging easier will usuallymake the golf ball go further. Techniques like ‘keeping your head down’ (or ‘eyeson the ball’), work well in several sports, like golf, tennis and baseball. Butsomeone who has not played any of these sports will intuitively ‘lift’ their headto see where the ball is going before the swing is completed.Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be an action or anopinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what.Therefore, decision making is a reasoning process which can be rational orirrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.Common examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, anddeciding whom or what to vote for in an election or referendum.Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that althoughwe can never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that adecision has been made. Therefore, we conclude that a psychological event that wecall "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitmentto action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made acommitment to affect the action.
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