In the early days of his career, Professor Alison was an expert in how to make decisions. He got a call from someone very senior who said that police chiefs were showing themselves unable to make crucial decisions. He asked if there was anything he could do.
It was. Alison began to translate what he knew from textbooks into practical advice. He says that the academic work on decision-making focused on studying how they are made. We needed to move it to live-on-the-line situations where almost every choice looked dire. I knew I could make a difference.
He and his colleague, Neil Shortland, who run training courses for military, law enforcement and political leaders around the world, have written a book that makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Alison says that the people they work with face a lot of decisions. Some of the decisions we make are life-changing. Do you want to commit to your partner or change career at the right time? Many people are scared of these decisions They think they are bad at making decisions. They wish someone would tell them what to do.
It is usually best to make your own decisions since there is almost always a decision that is unique to you. It is a question of focusing on the end goal rather than the process. Alison says the biggest mistake people make when making decisions is not focusing on the outcome. They fret about making the decision when what they should be doing is asking themselves what they really want to achieve. People fail to pay attention to what matters to them. They see that an option is appealing, but they don't think about what they have to give up to get it.
It is important to acknowledge the place of regret when making decisions. Fear of regretting a decision later is part of why they believe the biggest danger around decisions isn't doing the wrong thing, it's doing nothing Alison says that we are wired to want to keep the status quo. Big life decisions are not normal events in our lives. The easy thing to do is to be risk-averse and stick with what we have. He calls it "decision inertia" and says it is common in many knife-edge situations where there is no perfect outcome, just bad or worse. It's always going to be an unpalatable judgement to have to make when making ordinary life decisions.
Is it possible to make even the most difficult decisions? The formula was created by Alison and Shortland. situational awareness is about working out what is happening, why it is happening and what will happen next. Jenny discovered that her husband, Rob, was having an affair with a work colleague in their 11 year marriage. The discovery gave Jenny a huge decision to make, about whether to stay with Rob or leave him, and she had to work out what was going on in their marriage and in the other relationship. Jenny stayed, even though leaving Rob seemed to be the obvious way to go. She could see what had gone wrong in her marriage and she thought it was possible to fix it. According to Shortland, when you are up against it, your brain is already full of water. You have to let some of it go before you can think about what is happening. You need some time to figure out what's going on.
Time is important here as well. Before you make a decision, you need to calculate how much time there is available to make it in, and if there is no time frame at all. You have to watch out that you don't go down the doing nothing route because you have forever. If you choose to hang on rather than make a choice, you are effectively making the choice anyway, Alison and Shortland warn.
It is for adaptation. Good decision-makers are open-minded and adventurous and don't worry about exploring new possibilities. Shortland suggests that someone who gets a call out of the blue should offer them a job. The danger is that you will be flattered into taking it, thinking you have not had to work for it, so why not? Instead of rehearsing all the reasons why it makes sense to take it, test yourself with arguments about how it isn't right. He explained that we are wired to look for validation. You will pay the price if you are reassured that something is right and then it turns out to be incorrect.
R is for revision because it doesn't mean you can't revisit it. Shortland says that the Star model is anchored around what people tend to struggle with when making decisions. To describe the dangers of how your mind tends to want to go is what we want to show you. We want to look at decision-making as an organic process. Knowing what matters most to you is what makes our approachholistic.
According to Alison and Shortland, some personality types find it easier to make decisions than others. It's a problem for maximizers that they have to wait for everything to line up and miss an opportunity. You have to give up on other options in order to plump for one option. The more streamlined your decision-making becomes, the cooler you can be.
How do Alison and Shortland make their own decisions? Shortland was offered a new job and had to make a decision. He said it was a challenge because he had to reflect on what he really wanted. It took me five days to make my decision after writing a book about it. Some decisions are more difficult than others. Sometimes my stumbling block is reacting too quickly, not taking notice of my own advice, or if I can wait a while.
Artificial intelligence is being considered. Shortland says that Artificial Intelligence can play chess, guide fighter planes, and spot patterns. Can it tell us what to do? Is it possible that artificial intelligence could handle the next epidemic? The pros and cons are beginning to be looked at. This is the hottest topic right now and we are in the thick of it.
Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On is a book written by two people. You can buy a copy from guardian bookshop.com.
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