The Myths of Decision Making

For centuries, the assumption has been that people make decisions in a rational, careful, and thorough manner. Certainly since the triumph of rationalism after Descartes, the model for human thinking has been highly analytical and structured.

For example, Benjamin Franklin claimed in a letter he wrote to the British chemist Joseph Priestley that when confronted with a significant decision, he would divide a sheet of paper into two columns, label them Pro and Con, and then list all the evidence he could think of on each side. Next, he would compare the evidence from each column, striking out those that balanced each other out, until he was left with a preponderance of evidence on one side or another.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

The problem is that virtually nobody makes decisions that way. Franklin was describing an idealized process that simply doesn't work in the real world and never has.

Imagine for a moment that you are the unfortunate victim of an accident. While cleaning leaves and twigs from your roof, your ladder slips, plunging through a couple of layers of bushes and a porch railing. Luckily for you, someone sees the accident and calls for an emergency medical team. How would you feel if that team used Franklin's process for deciding how to treat you? By the time they divided a sheet of paper in half, wrote down all the positives and negatives associated with each course of action, and began to eliminate them, you'd be beyond help.

Obviously, emergency room nurses and physicians, medical response teams, police officers, firefighters, soldiers, and others who work in fast-paced, life-and-death environments don't function that way. And neither do businesspeople, students, government employees, or anybody else.

When we and our customers must make a decision, we usually find ourselves dealing with huge amounts of complex, confusing, often conflicting information. We are often under tremendous time pressure. We need to make the "right" decision because the consequences of a bad one could be catastrophic for our business or careers. So how do we do it?