Is This a Reversible Decision?
Every day we make many decisions. Making a decision is difficult for many people.
Why?
Some decisions have a time element where a decision has to be made by a certain date. It often feels like the world will end if the decision is delayed. That creates pressure to make the ” right” decision.
The second reason decision paralysis occurs is when we have multiple options. The difficulty is that each one of the choices is good enough and none of them a simply the best choice.
Many years ago I heard of a story where a researcher offered a few jams for sale. People would stop by the booth and sample. For those that bought, their purchases were equally divided among the few choices provided.
BUT when the experiment was repeated with many choices, the percentage of people who bought dropped drastically. They were overwhelmed by the choices and paralysis of analysis occurred.
The lesson learned is to keep the number of choices to a few. Interestingly there has been decision-making research that shows three is better than two and two is better than one choice.
I believe that most people are afraid to decide because they do not trust in themselves. You have to willing to be wrong AND be adaptive enough to recover from the mistake. Most people hate both of those options.
The best rule for decision-making is to make reversible decisions quickly and irreversible decisions deliberately. The key is to realize that most decisions are reversible even when you feel that they are not. It might require time and money BUT usually, the choice can be reversed.
Another component that most decision-makers do not consider is a deadline duration. In this area, I have found that 24 hours for everyone to chime works best. Most people suffer from a lack of focus so asking them to decide within 24 hours is better than giving them a week.
The last component of decision-making is to add an Expiration Date to your decisions. Sometimes we make decisions and those stay in place for too long. We never go back to evaluate whether what we chose is relevant anymore. We just simply live with the consequences of that decision without stopping to say that it is no longer valid and should be re-evaluated.
So those are the components that make decision-making challenging:
- Use of external pressure
- Too many options
- Be willing to be wrong and trust in yourself to adopt
- Set a 24hr deadline to make a decision(internal pressure vs. external pressure)
- Set a decision expiration date when the decision is no longer valid
Notice that the picture of leaves shows how there are many breaks from the centerline. There are even more smaller breaks from the centerline breaks. Those are all decision points that you are trying to control.
My four cents…
