Decision Making – is yours finely tuned?
Decision Making – is yours finely tuned?
Each day the average person makes thousands of decisions. In business some of these decisions have a major consequence on the business, either directly or indirectly. Decisions about products, services, strategy, policy, investments, communication all have the potential to impede or create progress. Many of these decisions are under pressure to be made at lightning speed to gain competitive advantage. At Quadrant 1 International we are privileged to have some of the most effective decision-making minds amongst our course participants where we use NLP techniques to model how they do this. The results of modelling these business minds over the years show some fascinating commonalities among them which are revealed here.
Thinking patterns
The most common is a visual mode using still imagery and the ability to capture an aspiration and shape it into how it will look in the real world. Often the images are schematic flow diagrams with a range of real life images associated with each stage. None of this is ever derived from a business plan or other document; it is created in the mind. There is also a strong combination of ‘away from’ and ‘towards’ motivations driving the speed of decision. ‘Away from’ images are quite strong but fleeting and quickly replaced by images of a desired future scenario. In NLP terms we call these motivations metaprogrammes.
Speed of processing
Often called intuition, our top decision-makers are often unaware at the way they review past similar decisions to determine if they are onto a winner or a loser. It can literally take a few moments to conduct this visual review, the outcome being a feeling telling them to stop or go. Fuelling this process is a strong desire for urgent action, to see something happening which will progress the business in some way.
Meta decision-making and feelings
This is the tendency to make a decision about a decision. For example, if I decide to invest £5m in new plant will this be a good decision? At the end of any decision, whether you are deciding a major purchase or what to have for lunch your decision will be made as a result of how you feel about it, regardless of the amount of analysis you carried out beforehand. Analysis will certainly inform your decision-making, but you will go with your feelings rather than against them. Being able to easily tell the difference between a ‘go’ feeling and a ‘stop’ feeling is another common trait. The strength of feelings and ability to calibrate them is key to effective decision-making.
There is a real fascination among our groups when we are modelling decision-making strategies, and this soon turns to powerful eureka moments as other members of the group learn to acquire the same decision-making abilities through direct installation during the course. Fast, effective decision-making can be learned, and the key is not in doing the external analysis, but working with your personal strategy.
David Molden, FCIPD
Quadrant 1 International
