Decision Tips
Use the rational decision process whenever possible.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
—M. Twain.
Sean Norris was facing a decision that many of us faced when we were about 17 or 18 years of age. A senior in high school, Sean was trying to decide where to go to college.
Picking a college is a big decision. It would determine where Sean would be for the next four years. It would set the direction for the rest of his life. Sean wasn’t about to approach a decision like this lightly.
Sean began by listing his criteria for what he wanted in a college. He preferred someplace not too far from his hometown, so he could drive home for long weekends and holidays. The school would have to have a program in accounting, since he was pretty sure that was what he wanted for a major. He wanted a school with a good reputation. And Sean’s folks reminded him that if the cost was over $15,000 a year, he better get financial aid or count on having a part-time job because that was all the help they could afford to provide. After considerable deliberation, Sean added a few more preferences to his list: someplace that had an intercollegiate golf team, a favorable ratio of women to men, and an active fraternity-sorority system.
When Sean shared his list with his dad, his dad reminded him that all of these criteria weren’t equally important. Cost and the availability of an accounting major, for instance, were probably a lot more important than the male-to-female ratio. Sean agreed, so he prioritized his criteria by weighting each on a scale from 1 to 10. Next, he used his career counselor at school, his local library, and the Internet to create a list of all the viable colleges that he might possibly consider attending. These efforts resulted in nearly 20 alternatives. Then Sean evaluated each of his 20 options. He became an “informed consumer” by reading as much as he could about each school, talking to people who had attended them, and visiting the campuses of the half-dozen or so that seemed to best fit his preferences. As he compared each college against the criteria and weights he previously set, the strengths and weaknesses of each became evident. Finally, Sean identified the college that scored highest on his evaluation and made it his first choice.
The steps that Sean went through are referred to as the rational decision process.1 It’s called rational because Sean has sought to make consistent, value-maximizing choices within the constraints he was given.2
Good decision making is built on rationality. Why? Because decisions based on logic, deliberate analysis, and the thoughtful search for complete information—rather than on gut feelings or experience—should lead to superior outcomes. The search for rationality forces you to confront and clarify your values so that your priorities will be consistent. This, in turn, provides you with the most direct path toward achievement of your life goals. Just as a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, rationality is the shortest distance between where you are and where you want to be.
The search for rationality forces you to confront and clarify your values so that your priorities will be consistent.
Rational decision making follows six standard steps:3
1. Identify and define the problem. A problem exists when there is a discrepancy between an existing and a desired state of affairs.
2. Identify decision criteria. This step clarifies for a decision maker what is relevant or important in making the decision. This step brings the decision maker’s interests, values, goals, and personal preferences into the process. Interestingly, it’s this listing of criteria that often results in two people, in similar situations, making different choices because what one person thinks is relevant may not be relevant to the other person. In the rational process, any factor not identified in this step is considered irrelevant to the decision maker and will have no bearing on the outcome.
3. Weight the criteria. Since the criteria are rarely all equal in importance, the decision maker needs to weight the previously identified criteria to give them correct priority in the decision.
4. Generate alternatives. This step requires the decision maker to generate all possible alternatives that could succeed in solving the problem.
5. Evaluate each alternative. After the alternatives are identified, each must be critically analyzed and evaluated—this is done by rating each alternative against the criteria listed in Step 2. The strengths and weaknesses of each alternative should become evident as they are compared with the criteria and weights established in the second and third steps.
6. Select the choice that scores highest. Finally, the process concludes by choosing the alternative that scores highest. This is the optimal choice.
Note that these are exactly the steps that Sean followed in making his college decision. He identified his problem: finding a college to attend. He identified and weighted the criteria he thought important in his decision. He developed a list of colleges to consider. Then he carefully evaluated each and selected the one that best met his needs.
What might Sean’s decision process have looked like had he not sought rationality? Here are a few non-rational scenarios: (1) Sean begins with an implicit favorite, and then looks for reasons to reject it. (2) He focuses singularly on one school that offers him a large financial aid package and ignores his other goals and criteria. (3) He decides to go to a school because it has a prominent golf coach. (4) He makes his choice based only on what he read in the various colleges’ catalogs. Each of these approaches increase the likelihood that Sean would regret his original decision—making him unhappy and possibly transferring to another school or dropping out of college altogether.
Your goal should be to make rational decisions, especially when you’re facing major, life-changing events. Throughout this book, I offer suggestions to help you make your decision process more rational. However, as we show in the next chapter, there are a number of reasons why rationality is more an ideal than reality, so your quest becomes one of attempting to be as rational as possible.
Use the rational decision process whenever possible.
The time and care necessary to follow the rational process is especially important when you’re facing major, life-changing events.