3 Things You Need to Make Right Decisions

SUMMARY

Did you regret wrong decisions? That is a normal reaction because if we could be right, why be wrong? Did you get more fearful after making a wrong decision and trusting yourself less in subsequent decisions? Fear is also a normal consequence of making wrong decisions. This podcast episode makes use of a dilemma from a narrative found in the internet about a man walking in the desert for days looking for water. The man found a bottled water with instructions to use the water to start a pump. Avic Caparas illustrates the different decision options using a decision tree. From that illustration, she gives 3 tips to make right decisions. These tips include being creative to get out of a two-option decision situation, including the decision-maker’s wellbeing or survival among the decision criteria or areas of consideration, consider the decision consequences to other people who will are affected by it.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

TRANSCRIPT

Today I give you 3 tips to making right decisions.

I start without any presumption that you are listening to someone who makes and implements perfectly right decisions all the time. Even I myself don’t like someone who is so perfect. Wait, was it in a retreat in Spain that I heard these unforgettable words: La doña perfecta es insoportable. Translated to English, the perfect woman is unbearable. 25 years after hearing that sentence. I still remember it. So the impact was great and it reminds me not to appear perfect because I am not. And if I could help inspire of not being prefect why not?

Now’s let's tackle the question of the day. How do you make the right decisions?

Would you agree if I put this general question in a specific context.I google-searched a dilemma that we could use today and I found this two options dilemma within a story about a man walking in the desert and really almost dying of thirst.

A word of caution here: I am using the story to come up with a decision tree and to draw decision lessons from. As it is, the narrative has helped millions to improve the way they deal with their choices. And I congratulate the source for all the help he has given to humanity. 

What I am going to do is extend the narrative to a decision case study.

The story is about a man who got lost in a desert. For several days walking without water, he did not lose hope. He kept on walking and suddenly he found a small hut. Unfortunately, it did not have water source.  But the man found a bottle filled with water with instructions “you have use this water to start the pump don’t forget to fill the bottle when you’re done.” If he follows the instructions and the pump does not work, he throws away all the water he has and might die after pumping the water to no avail.  According to the story, the man takes a leap of faith and uses the water to pump so much water for his needs. He refilled the container and adds his note to the original message saying "Believe me it works." 

The moral lesson is if you take a risk and the instruction works, then you save your life  and  you get to tell the people that it works. If it does not work then we can share the experience to still help others make the right choice.

Now, let’s tackle the dilemma mentioned in the story using a decision tree. 

A decision tree puts a dilemma into a graphic image.

If you are in that situation of the man in the desert, you will not have the time and energy to do a decision tree. So I highly recommend that you get into the habit of making decision trees while you are not in those life-and-death situations or while you have more time and serenity. It’s like an exercise drill that you will find useful when you are going to make real hard and tough decisions later. It’s like practicing with the fire extinguisher determining how to use it, knowing the parts, so that in real situation of fire, you would know what to do, fast and quick. 

It's how business schools that teach using the case method accomplish maximum results in their students who really improve in making decisions. I was a former student in one of the business schools that learned from Harvard in the case method. And I fell once into that desperate attempt to prepare for a case discussion doing it very fast and rationalizing it. I said to myself: in real life I would not have the luxury of time to do any decision tree or matrix, so I will do this fast in 5 minutes. But I came back to my senses when I told myself: "You are right, Avic, in the real world you won’t have the luxury of 2 hours for a case to be decided. But be realistic, you do have time right now while studying. So take advantage of this time, really do an in-depth analysis and train your mind to make a logical decision."

So I will demonstrate the creation of a decision tree in this dilemma narrative I found in the internet. 

We start from the left to the right. The left is the decision, in the right we reach the outcomes.

So here at the left side I start with a square and a square signifies the decision to be made.

I draw two lines coming out of that square. The first line  is slanted towards the northeast, it a line to the right slanted upwards and the decision option here is a quote from the narrative.

 “Use this water to start the pump. Don’t forget to fill the bottle when you’re done.”

Next from the decision node which is our square, we draw another line towards the southeast or to the right slanted downwards and the option there is "to ignore it and just drink the water."

Let’s focus first on the second option because it is simpler as there is no probability issuing from that decision. So let's draw an arrow toward the right, almost near the margin of the paper as this is the location of decision outcomes. 

 What will really happen is the decision maker will satisfy his thirst from 100% content of the container and won’t be able to refill it because there is no other water available for the pump to work. 

Will I be hydrated? Absolutely or 100% with all the water contents. But will I be able to refill the container?  We assume that the refilled water would be useful for the next stranger to pass by. The answer is no. So it is 100% satisfied and zero refill.

Let’s go to the other decision option “Use this water to start the pump.” What probability will I attach to the fact that the pump will work with the water in the bottle? Wait Avic, you ask me. Does the story say that there is a probability? No, but I am using a bounded rationality characteristic in decision making. I am borrowing the notion of bounded rationality from Herbert Simon, author of the book Administrative Behavior: a Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. 

Bounded rationality is the opposite of perfect rationality. I don’t have complete information that the water pump works but by the looks of it, it seems to work because perhaps the container or bottled water seems newly refilled, etc. I can have my guess. But I cannot be 100% sure. I could make a leap of faith like in the story and voluntarily assign 100% to the probability that the pump will work and it will give me more water. But the reality is that even if  the message came from my best friend but she has not used a pump all her life. I won’t assign 100% outcome. But at the moment, if I were the man in the narrative I am not in my best friend’s house, I just found this hut in the middle of the desert, I think we could put some probability.

From this decision option of using the water in the container to start the pump, I will draw a circle or a chance node where we will show some probabilities of the outcome occurring. I will put 50-50 probabilities.

Hence from the circle, I will draw a line slanted up or toward northeast and I assign a 50% chance that the water pump would work and water would come out. 

Then  again from the circle, I will draw another line slanted down or toward southeast and I assign a 50% chance that the pump won’t work and no water would come out. 

From these two probable results I will draw arrows towards the right and type here the consequences or decision outcomes

• Depending on whether the pump will work, I will have 50% chance of quenching my thirst or 50% chance of staying thirsty.
• Depending still on whether the water pump will work, there is a 50% chance that I can refill the container and 50% chance of no refill.

What would be the decision then? 

If I care for myself alone, and do not care for the next stranger to come, I will ignore the message and just drink the water. 

If I care for short term results only and I won’t think of how much travel lies ahead and how much more water I need, I will ignore the message.

Here you will see that if you don’t care for the others, you are not caring for yourself also, not thinking of getting the provisions for your subsequent walk in this desert by not working on the pump. 

However, if I use the water in the bottle to work on the water pump, I only have 50% possibility of satisfying my thirst and 50% possibility of leaving water for the next stranger to come along. It seems this is neither the right decision.

Tip #1 to make a right decision, get yourself out of two option decisional situations as soon as possible. You have to be more creative. At the same time, life is really not presenting two options alone and always. It's not always an either-or situation.

For example you can be pushed to deciding to enroll in an online business course when the message is either pursue your passion or get stuck in your 9-to-5 work. The reality could be that you cannot afford to resign from your job yet you don’t have financial resources to last you for 3 months, so you start using your weekends to pursue your passion and keep using your weekdays in your 9-5 job.

Some writers would call this two-option cases as a false dilemma fallacy when there are actually more options available if you only take the time and creativity to search for more options. Some writers would say life is not black or white, life is many shades of color.

Hence, avoid extreme decision options.  If I am not ready to make a decision yet because I think there’s got to be more options here, I read the case again to confirm that the instruction is not about using all of the water to start the pump. There I find an opening for another option. Hence in the decision tree, I draw a line from the decision node or square and list another option to just drink a little of the water first  and use most of the water to start the pump. The result is I am hydrated. Is that sip enough? For me when I am very thirsty and there is not much water, just a sip would be heaven. 

From this decision I draw a line and a circle and the probabilities are similar to the first option, either the pump works or it does not work, but the outcome will be concentrated on refilling the container for the next person who will come. For all intents and purposes, I am already hydrated, with a little energy yet ready to use the pump.

 So here in this decision tree, I have 3 options instead of 2. If to ignore the instruction was a wrong decision, and to use the water for the pump is not satisfactory, this time I created a third option of sipping a little water first to give me energy to do some water pumping. And I am happier and satisfied with this newly created option especially if the outcome is there is water from the pump and I could refill the water container. If water did not come out of the pump, I would not be as guilty as when I drank all water from the container. I just took a sip to quench my thirst and it already gave me more energy to pump the water.

Tip #2 to make right decisions is include yourself and your wellbeing in your decision criteria. The decision criteria are the areas for consideration. In our case, it’s
(a) whoever wrote the instructions, we want to follow him or her we are only guests in the hut. (b) We also considered the next stranger who will come along. (c) And in the third newly created option, I included my own satisfaction of my thirst first. I sipped a little water which is the middle ground between taking all the water and not drinking anything at all, using all water for the water pump.

 I cared for myself first, because having come from days in the desert and I am dying of thirst, I have zero energy to work on the water pump but I am not so selfish to just drink all, i took just a sip of water.

I have seen many wrong decisions when the decision-maker puts herself least in the priority or she does not include herself. Like a well-meaning career woman would work herself to death to feed her family, losing sleep not eating the right kind of food, not eating on time, I have many examples like this in my work-life balance videos here in this channel. To these people who are so selfless they would die as martyrs for work-life conflicts, I would say, you know our national hero Jose Rizal is depicted in a monument in Luneta Park, that monument has little space of other martyrs. 

 My main idea in saying that to the people in the audience is for them not to make of themselves martyrs unnecessarily, not to die young when they have put their health and their lives in danger with unhealthy lifestyle and a lot of overtime and stress at work.

Tip#2 of including your wellbeing in the decision equation is to think of your own survival. Like for an employee who has allowed herself to be like a punching bag of her colleagues bullying words and actions, I said to her the options are not limited to either resigning or not resigning from that company. First she might find other bullies in her future company and if she will not learn to deal with the bullies now, then she won’t be prepared to deal with the bullies in the future. So I advised her immediately think first how to protect yourself from bullying. And if her option is to resign, think also if she loves her work which is not the same as the people she works with who bullies her. The question to consider about job satisfaction is will she ever find another job that she will like, Again let's separate the work from other realities like the officemates.  Also I told her to consider her professional relationship with her supervisor who is not one of the bullies, will she easily find someone like that supervisor in the future. And lastly, I suggested to her to think of her current customers. If she resigns, what is the possibility that the customers she loves and serves will not be re-assigned to the bullies. 

 My conclusion here in this case that can help us think of right decision is the person who wants to resign is giving up many good things that could actually be helping her to survive the workplace even with the presence of the bullies. But then again, she has to think of middle ground options rather than giving up these good things by resigning. 

At the minimum as regards tip#2 of including your survival or your wellbeing in the decision equation is this: the right decision is that which does not make you a worse person or put yourself in worse situation after the decision, at the minimum. 

For the man in the desert, option 1 is putting himself at risk 50% of the time, if he entered the hut with 2% energy left, what would happen to him if he pours all the water into the pump and start pumping. Perhaps it won’t work not because of the pump but he did not have the sufficient energy to pull up and pull down the pump. Then Option 2 to ignore the instruction will make him less thirsty and more selfish. 

For the employee who is being bullied, the option to resign is to escape from the bullies without any guarantee that similar ones won’t appear in the next company and she would not be prepared to deal with the next set of bullies. Deciding for this is giving in to cowardice or despair that the bullies will never change or they will never be reprimanded in such a way that they will multiply their race. 

Then the option not to resign without protecting herself or thinking of her survival is like entering the lions’ den everyday. Bring it on, you’d tell the lions. She could turn into someone who likes being hurt and its not a normal desire. She has to find a middle ground solution that will satisfy her other criteria of continuing the good relationship with her supervisor or her customers.

 Hence, think hard of other options that will not make you worse after the decision or perhaps if possible make you a better person.

Tip #3 in making a right decision has somewhat been covered in what I have mentioned about the next stranger to come along in that hut also in search of water. The decision-maker must think of other persons who will be affected by future actions ensuing from the decision. Will the next stranger be grateful that you really thought long and hard to be able to provide him with water? It does not matter. What matters is the decision maker took the effort to think of that next stranger.

The right decision does not depend on the outcome on other persons. It depends on how the decision-maker learns to include outcomes for other people n her or his decision -making process. The goal is not to be a worse person after the decision is made and all action plans implemented. It is not our goal to be liked or thanked for the good deed.

Therefore, each decision is an opportunity to have a wider vision of reality and the reality is our actions affect other people. Also, each decision presents the freedom to choose to be a better person. Each decision holds a space for you to become a better version of yourself.