Decision making is the process of making choices by setting goals, gathering information, and assessing alternative occupations.
Problem solving and decision-making are important skills for business and life. Problem-solving often involves decision-making, and decision-making is especially important for management and leadership. There are processes and techniques to improve decision-making and the quality of decisions. Decision-making is more natural to certain personalities, so these people should focus more on improving the quality of their decisions. People that are less natural decision-makers are often able to make quality assessments, but then need to be more decisive in acting upon the assessments made. Problem-solving and decision-making are closely linked, and each requires creativity in identifying and developing options, for which the brainstorming technique is particularly useful.
As per UMass there are seven steps in effective decision making.
Decisions that involve:
Uncertainty – Many of the facts may be unknown.
Complexity – There can be many, interrelated factors to consider.
High-risk consequences – The impact of the decision may be significant.
Alternatives – There may be various alternatives, each with its own set of uncertainties and consequences.
Interpersonal issues – You need to predict how different people will react.
When you’re making a decision that involves complex issues like these, you also need to engage your problem-solving, as well as decision-making skills. It pays to use an effective, robust process in these circumstances, to improve the quality of your decisions and to achieve consistently good results.
In real-life business situations, decisions can often fail because the best alternatives are not clear at the outset, or key factors are not considered as part of the process. To stop this happening, you need to bring problem-solving and decision-making strategies together to clarify your understanding.
A logical and ordered process can help you to do this by making sure that you address all of the critical elements needed for a successful outcome.
Working through this process systematically will reduce the likelihood of overlooking important factors.
Ethical Decisions:
Ethical principles provide the foundations for various modern concepts for work, business and organisations, which broaden individual and corporate priorities far beyond traditional business aims of profit and shareholder enrichment. Ethical factors are also a significant influence on institutions and public sector organisations, for whom the traditional priorities of service quality and cost management must now increasingly take account of these same ethical considerations affecting the commercial and corporate world.
The modern concept of ethical organisations encompasses many related issues including:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) – or simply social responsibility
The ‘triple bottom line’
Ethical management and leadership
‘Fairtrade’
Globalization (addressing its negative effects)
Sustainabilityorporateorporate governance
Corporate governance
Social enterprise
Mutuals, cooperatives, employee ownership
Micro-finance and well-being at work and life balance, including the Psychological Contract.
Cynefin framework:
Cynefin framework provides a typology of contexts that guides what sort of explanations or solutions might apply. It draws on research into complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, anthropology, and narrative patterns, as well as evolutionary psychology, to describe problems, situations, and systems. It “explores the relationship between man, experience, and context”[4] and proposes new approaches to communication, decision-making, policy-making, and knowledge management in complex social environments.
Cynefin categorizes problems into 5 domain.
Cynefin framework exists to help us realize that all situations are not created equal and to help us understand that different situations require different responses to successfully navigate them.
Obvious (formerly known as Simple) is the domain of best practices.
Characteristics: Problems are well understood and solutions are evident. Solving problems requires minimal expertise. Many issues addressed by help desks fall into this category. They are handled via pre-written scripts.
Approach: Problems here are well known. The correct approach is to sense the situation, categorize it into a known bucket, and apply a well-known, and potentially scripted, solution.
Complicated is the domain of good practices.
Characteristics: You have a general idea of the known unknowns — you likely know the questions you need to answer and how to obtain the answers. Assessing the situation requires expert knowledge to determine the appropriate course of action. Given enough time, you could reasonably identify known risk and devise a relatively accurate plan. Expertise is required, but the work is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Approach: Sense the problem and analyze. Apply expert knowledge to assess the situation and determine a course of action. Execute the plan.
Complex is the domain of emergent solutions.
Characteristics: There are unknown unknowns — you don’t even know the right questions to ask. Even beginning to understand the problem requires experimentation. The final solution is only apparent once discovered. In hindsight it seems obvious, but it was not apparent at the outset. No matter how much time you spend in analysis, it is not possible to identify the risks or accurately predict the solution or effort required to solve the problem.
Approach: Develop and experiment to gather more knowledge. Execute and evaluate. As you gather more knowledge, determine your next steps. Repeat as necessary, with the goal of moving your problem into the “Complicated” domain.
Chaotic is the domain of novel solutions.
Characteristics: As the name implies, this is where things get a bit crazy. Things have gone off the rails and the immediate priority is containment. Example: Production defects. Your initial focus is to correct the problem and contain the issue. Your initial solution may not be the best, but as long as it works, it’s good enough. Once you’ve stopped the bleeding, you can take a breath and determine a real solution.
Approach: Triage. Once you have a measure of control, assess the situation and determine next steps. Take action to remediate or move your problem to another domain.
Disorder is the space in the middle.
Characteristics: If you don’t know where you are, you’re in “Disorder.” Priority one is to move you to a known domain.
Approach: Gather more info on what you know or identify what you don’t know. Get enough info to move to a more defined domain.
Neuroscientists Identify Brain Circuit That Controls Decision-Making Under Conflict
A newly published study details how neuroscientists from MIT identified a neural circuit that controls decision-making under conflict.
Some decisions arouse far more anxiety than others. Among the most anxiety-provoking are those that involve options with both positive and negative elements, such choosing to take a higher-paying job in a city far from family and friends, versus choosing to stay put with less pay.
MIT researchers have now identified a neural circuit that appears to underlie decision-making in this type of situation, which is known as approach-avoidance conflict. The findings could help researchers to discover new ways to treat psychiatric disorders that feature impaired decision-making, such as depression, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder.ñ
“In order to create a treatment for these types of disorders, we need to understand how the decision-making process is working,” says Alexander Friedman, a research scientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the lead author of a paper describing the findings in the May 28 issue of Cell.
Friedman and colleagues also demonstrated the first step toward developing possible therapies for these disorders: By manipulating this circuit in rodents, they were able to transform a preference for lower-risk, lower-payoff choices to a preference for bigger payoffs despite their bigger costs.
The paper’s senior author is Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor and member of the McGovern Institute. Other authors are postdoc Daigo Homma, research scientists Leif Gibb and Ken-ichi Amemori, undergraduates Samuel Rubin and Adam Hood, and technical assistant Michael Riad.
Making hard choices
The new study grew out of an effort to figure out the role of striosomes — clusters of cells distributed through the the striatum, a large brain region involved in coordinating movement and emotion and implicated in some human disorders. Graybiel discovered striosomes many years ago, but their function had remained mysterious, in part because they are so small and deep within the brain that it is difficult to image them with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Previous studies from Graybiel’s lab identified regions of the brain’s prefrontal cortex that project to striosomes. These regions have been implicated in processing emotions, so the researchers suspected that this circuit might also be related to emotion.
To test this idea, the researchers studied mice as they performed five different types of behavioral tasks, including an approach-avoidance scenario. In that situation, rats running a maze had to choose between one option that included strong chocolate, which they like, and bright light, which they don’t, and an option with dimmer light but weaker chocolate.
When humans are forced to make these kinds of cost-benefit decisions, they usually experience anxiety, which influences the choices they make. “This type of task is potentially very relevant to anxiety disorders,” Gibb says. “If we could learn more about this circuitry, maybe we could help people with those disorders.”
The researchers also tested rats in four other scenarios in which the choices were easier and less fraught with anxiety.
“By comparing performance in these five tasks, we could look at cost-benefit decision-making versus other types of decision-making, allowing us to reach the conclusion that cost-benefit decision-making is unique,” Friedman says.
Using optogenetics, which allowed them to turn cortical input to the striosomes on or off by shining light on the cortical cells, the researchers found that the circuit connecting the cortex to the striosomes plays a causal role in influencing decisions in the approach-avoidance task, but none at all in other types of decision-making.
When the researchers shut off input to the striosomes from the cortex, they found that the rats began choosing the high-risk, high-reward option as much as 20 percent more often than they had previously chosen it. If the researchers stimulated input to the striosomes, the rats began choosing the high-cost, high-reward option less often.
Paul Glimcher, a professor of physiology and neuroscience at New York University, describes the study as a “masterpiece” and says he is particularly impressed by the use of a new technology, optogenetics, to solve a longstanding mystery. The study also opens up the possibility of studying striosome function in other types of decision-making, he adds.
“This cracks the 20-year puzzle that [Graybiel] wrote — what do the striosomes do?” says Glimcher, who was not part of the research team. “In 10 years we will have a much more complete picture, of which this paper is the foundational stone. She has demonstrated that we can answer this question, and answered it in one area. A lot of labs will now take this up and resolve it in other areas.”
Emotional gatekeeper
The findings suggest that the striatum, and the striosomes in particular, may act as a gatekeeper that absorbs sensory and emotional information coming from the cortex and integrates it to produce a decision on how to react, the researchers say.
That gatekeeper circuit also appears to include a part of the midbrain called the substantia nigra, which has dopamine-containing cells that play an important role in motivation and movement. The researchers believe that when activated by input from the striosomes, these substantia nigra cells produce a long-term effect on an animal or human patient’s decision-making attitudes.
“We would so like to find a way to use these findings to relieve anxiety disorder, and other disorders in which mood and emotion are affected,” Graybiel says. “That kind of work has a real priority to it.”
In addition to pursuing possible treatments for anxiety disorders, the researchers are now trying to better understand the role of the dopamine-containing substantia nigra cells in this circuit, which plays a critical role in Parkinson’s disease and may also be involved in related disorders.
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https://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml