DECISION MAKING AND THE BIASES

BLOG 7: DECISION MAKING

In 1983, the famous Bengali poet Sakti Chattopadhay received the Sahitya Academy award for his collection of entitled” Jete pari kintu keno jabo?” which translates to “ I can go but WHY?” As a child when I used to hear my father reciting the poem and giving an emphasis on this “Why” more than once in his baritone voice, I always wondered about its importance. The question to go or not, is it really that hard to decide? As I grew older, learned my ways through the job life and all, the answer became clearer than before and soon my realization forced me to ponder “What lies beyond that WHY”? And the answer I got to know is “everything”. It is this WHY, the decision making ability of a person which determines the individual’s future and reshape the environment surrounding him. In the last IDIO class when madam was teaching about “Decision Making” as a topic, I couldn’t think less about that old poem which once transcended me to the understanding of the real world. Every significant decision has an implication which can either go our way or can lead upto an unfavourable end. We did an exercise in the class where we wrote down about a decision that we took in our life, how it was decided and was it good or bad. I wrote down about joining the MBA program, how I came to the decision of joining the program at IIT Madras and was the decision favourable to me or not. So, every decision we make, we tend to have an expectation, thus every decision has an objective. And then there are biases which always put hindrance to our decision making. People talk a lot about step wise decision making and how it can be efficiently applied in our day to day life. But this is the biggest myth; about ninety percent of the efficient decisions are born out of our intuitions. Intuitions follow a recognising pattern and can be enhanced with practise and experience. In the class we have also learned about the assumptions of classical decision making model; the bounded rationality and the concept of best satisfying solution being the strongest assumptions we put forward to. Thus we can take a decision based on our intuition; we can judge the short term and long term benefits, can look upto the alternating evidences, weigh our pros and cons and finally answer the “WHY” after all.