People will do almost anything to avoid ambiguity in thought. When faced with an issue, people will often come to faulty conclusions, act or not act on information that has been presented with results that frequently are less than desirable. Decision making and how to think, is not effectively taught in schools, families, or corporations. Poor decision making damages morale, reduces productivity, and efficiency.
Companies, families, governments, non-profits, individuals suffer, meetings come to a screeching halt, new product launches are delayed, websites are noisy and ineffective, spouses argue, budgets are blown, often because people don’t know how to think through issues and make good decisions. People are blamed, circumstances are blamed when results are less than reliable. Now that the world is facing some of its greatest crises, thought processes are being brought into question.
According to Futurist, Theodore J. Gordon, a founding member of the Institute for Global Ethics, all of the big issues that our world is facing come down to one simple problem, “lousy decision making.” According to the article, “Humanity’s Worst Threat: Poor Decision Making“, dated May 27th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentary by Rushworth M. Kidder, Global Ethics, “Our leaders, Gordon emphasized, aren’t bad people. But ‘they don’t have a good grounding in decision making, because decision making is ad hoc.’ As a result, today’s decisions often rely too much on the decision maker’s reputation or on undetermined psychological factors. Worse still, decisions even can rely on what he called ‘creating opportunities for the family’ or on ‘what you had for breakfast.’”
Thomas Edison tried two thousand different materials in search of a filament for the light bulb. When none worked satisfactorily, his assistant complained, “All our work is in vain. We have learned nothing.”
Edison replied very confidently, “Oh, we have come a long way and we have learned a lot. We know that there are two thousand elements which we cannot use to make a good light bulb. (taken from Inspirational Stories)
When your decision making processes have not been effective, when you have failed to come to effective conclusions, learn from your mistakes, learn to think again, learn processes for thinking and for making effective decisions. If you’ve run out of processes that you already know in thinking, hiring a professional can sometimes help you learn the path to better decisions.
Leah Henderson, President, Leah Henderson & Associates
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