Business Decision Making

Think back to your own experience. The time you ‘knew’ what needed to be done, but because of the perceived difficulty in implementing it, you held back and sought another ‘more ‘perfect’ solution. Many decisions are made (or avoided) simply to maintain personal comfort.

A common saying in business is “The best is the enemy of the good.” Such analysis paralysis is rightly recognised as the enemy.

At the operational level, many follow the dictum of energy and drive. We carry out parallel trials, we ‘fail fast’ in order to get the feedback which guides our aim more accurately. We have the confidence to push through discouragement and rejection and the self-belief to overcome our ‘head trash’ and fear of failure because we’ve learnt that (in the absence of intuition), it’s just a numbers game. Marketers in particular are versed in throwing lots of mud at walls in order to find what sticks.

The downside of such activity is that failure ‘costs’. “Half of our money is wasted, but we don’t know which half” While persistence is often praised, it can take us where we really didn’t want to go, hence the tale of the executive reaching the top of the executive ladder, only to discover it was leaning on the wrong wall.

In business, where complex decisions need to be made quickly you need to improve the odds of success and this is where intuition scores highly. Intuitive judgements are characterised by their speed, and ‘good sense’. Speed of the decision is matched by the ability (because all emotions are in agreement) to act on the decision. Such clarity and decisiveness is a characteristic of many successful people.

It’s interesting that few successful business people believe they have superior knowledge. Rather, they are acutely aware and respectful of their gut feel or intuition.

Napoleon promoted generals who were ‘lucky’ (But then he lost the battle of waterloo)

Financial institutions use analytical software to reduce risk. They ’showed the door’ to Edison, Walt Disney etc who “failed” repeatedly, only to turn these experiences into later successes.

We have seen in previous posts, the role of intuition in our decision making processes

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