“Digital Valley” Chapter IV Book Preview: Decision Wisdom ~ Future of CIO

Saturday, April 16, 2016

“Digital Valley” Chapter IV Book Preview: Decision Wisdom

11:21 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Wisdom has to do with the soundness of judgment.

The majority of leaders and professional spend a significant amount of time on making large or small decisions in the work and life. It takes wisdom, not just the intelligence to make effective decisions. There is fuzziness in the decisions because there is fuzziness in conflicting criteria. At the Digital Era, making data-based decisions means to leverage analytical thinking, advanced analytic tools, the human’s intuition, and add the “wisdom’ in the decision process to improve the overall effectiveness of decision making.

Judgment and decision making are often considered together: The biggest challenge is knowing what you don’t know, it’s a reasonable moniker for decision-making blind spot and biases. Hence, good judgment is a must for good decisions. There is also a clear distinction between a good decision and a good outcome. In the world of uncertainty and ambiguity, the mind with decision wisdom can, by definition, not control the outcome, however, focus on making good decisions and the best chance for a good outcome is to make a good decision. Some consider decision making is a skill, others think it’s a leadership quality. Either way, it starts with such a “decisive mindset,” with decision wisdom - information-empowered, analytics oriented, and striking the right balance between confidence and humility, logic and creativity; thinking big & small; thinking fast & slow. Decision-making it both art and science.

Applying Critical Thinking for Decision Making: Critical Thinking is an important skill to deal with the multi-logical situation or today’s digital dynamic, which are complex with many moving parts, require multiple disciplines, or have multiple valid viewpoints. Hence, it is crucial to leverage Critical Thinking in decision analysis: the sense of urgency, the impact of decision, scope, who is being impacted, how likely the situation is likely to change or better information will become known, etc. Critical Thinking brings insight into different situations. It is contextual, it involves both induction and deduction continuum. At an organizational level, the purpose of business is given in the quality of collective thought upon business vision and strategy, and how effective you can make decisions to move the business forward at today’s digital dynamic, thinking critically, thinking creatively and think profoundly.

Framing the right questions for Decision Making: One of the most important tasks for business management is to make decisions. However, across the sectors, many business professionals fail to make effective decisions, and part of problems is that they frame the wrong questions, which means they intend to do things RIGHT before doing the RIGHT things, or they try to figure out “HOW,” instead of digging through “WHY” first. It’s also due to the lack of inquisitive minds. People need to ask questions. The proper framing, probabilistic reasoning, sensitivity analysis, vale of information and control are integrated techniques. Framing the right questions requires insightful thinking, visualizing all perspectives and trade-offs prior to making an effective decision.

Decision wisdom is multidimensional, and decision making takes a multidisciplinary approach, frame the right questions before answer them. It has a combination of analytical/logical thinking up front and intuition to weigh on varying factors, and ensure you include the right information and look at all possible options, and then make the fair judgment and select the best decision.