Decision Making: A Risky Business? Or an adventure?

By Ragnar Haabjoern
2010
http://thewonderingecologist.blogspot.com/

I recently attended a facilitation workshop that focussed on assisting a group through the
journey of decision making. It was very enlightening. The topic of decision making
allowed for the echoing of my Mother’s wise and advisory comment from her life’s
journey that,

“To make a decision is the hardest thing in life to do!”

This was the third workshop in a series in the art of facilitation. The opening quote by the
facilitator used a grab of etymology that the ‘facile’ from the word facilitation, its root
meaning is ‘to make things easy’.

So, if we have ‘decision making’ as the hardest thing to do, assisted by ‘facilitation’,
something that is supposed to make things easier than this is destined to be certainly a
marriage made in heaven. The first question that was issued to the workshop participants
was,
“Why is it so hard to make a decision?”

The following reasons were voiced:

• It takes a public manifestation of ‘Responsibility’ to make a decision.
• To make a decision leads us most often to the realm of the unknown. A place
where we don’t fully 100% know the outcomes of our choice.
• Sometimes we cannot go back from the decision that we make.
• The status quo may be rocked? The decision may cause upset. There is often an
innate fear when initiating change.
• On a very basic level there is the notion of laziness. A new decision may have a
ripple effect to other parts of the system and this may mean extra work.

Using the Buddhist based paradoxical statement that the only true constant in the
universe is change, then decisions are an inevitable aspect of our existence if we are to
stay true to the universal constant of change. Many in the realm of environmentalism
believe that change in almost everything we do as a society, the way we think, our being
and how our economic paradigm operates is what will save humanity and increase the
quality of life for all on this planet.

The first technique demonstrated by the lead facilitator on this decision making journey
was to map out the decision, the scenarios and the outcomes. Visually mapping out the
impact of a decision allowed for a release of the anxiety, the fear of travelling to the
unknown or uncharted waters. So rule one was to map the decision.
The next tool demonstrated was the values grid. Simple in means but rich in ends.
Values Vs Effort. High value, low effort. Low value, high effort. High value, high effort.
Low value, low effort. Immediately these four quadrants display a helpful decision
making tool. If your decision fits into the High Value/Low Effort quadrant, the question
is why wouldn’t you go forth with that proposal?

What emerged from working through this ‘Values grid’ was a conversation on what are
the actual values to be selected and graded against?

And what are the various efforts that we are utilising to make explicit our decision
making process on this grid?

It became apparent that it helps greatly for an organisation to be very clear of its own
core values and definitions of efforts to aide in utilising the grid. Organisational values
discussed included conservation potential, profit, reputation, experience, carbon
emissions, resource efficiency, economy and reputation. Efforts discussed included time,
resources and organisational/purpose fit.

During this section of the workshop my thoughts wondered to the work I had done for the
communities of the Murray-Darling river basin. As part of assisting students to come up
with action plans to assist their own communities, the environment and themselves, we
asked the students to come up with a list of values that they felt were important. This
ownership of values important to the self but also connected to the whole was critical in
helping the process and ultimately the decision that was going to be made. This is where
it may be useful as part of any facilitation journey that is deciding on an organisational
decision that it should also acknowledge and include personal values. These I believe
would have a two-way benefit of empowering the audience as well as assisting the whole
process.

The next part of the decision making strategy was the introduction of a simple risk
assessment, again using a visual tool. And again, very simple, a two axis graph, Cost Vs
Probability (odds). This section of the workshop really got my neurons humming as I
thought back to a presentation I was privy to regarding the etymology of the word risk. In
Cline (2004), he states from citing the Ancient Greek origins of the word Risk that,

“Peirao is defined as: To attempt, endeavour, try to do, to try ones fortune, to make an
attempt by sea, to make trial of one (Andrews, 1879).”

Juxtaposing this meaning elucidation to its modern day use there is a clear double
meaning associated with the word risk. Cline represents this paradox in the following
text,

“The duality of risk becomes clear in this definition, with authors often using the word
to denote both danger and a bold or courageous gesture.”
Cline’s spanner in the risky works does add an extra dimension to the process of risk
analysis. Cline does however provide assistance to this quandary of danger Vs adventure
when using the word risk and conducting a risk assessment. He states quite forcibly that
an organisation must come up with its own workable definition of risk.

“Looking into the future, the one constant that we know will exist is change.
Technological, as well as social change, are facts of life and this means that more and
more people are going to need help navigating uncertainty. Without a clear and
balanced lexicon regarding risk and human interaction with uncertainty we face not
only conceptual errors, but clear operational costs.” Cline (2004)

Back to the decision making adventure…

The facilitator made another strong point about the decision making process,

“Deliberation is important!”

So if you had to put a phrase to this whole process I would feel comfortable in using the
stated term deliberative decision making. This I feel addresses one of the stated earlier
apprehensions of decision making, that primal instinct of fear. If we have dotted the i’s
and crossed the t’s and the journey of the decision made is transparent then this should
alleviate the apprehension to go forth. A process has been used, haphazardness has been
denied. We hope!

But is this decision making journey just all well too prescribed?

During the workshop a topic of big discussion was the role that emotions can play in
making decisions.

“Who out there has in one instance or another, gone through the evidence and then
whammo just gone with the ‘gut instinct' to make a decision?”

It is time now to again jump into the time machine and visit Ancient Greece and in
particular the philosopher Aristotle. As a budding philosopher I find it always good value
to reach into the depths of wisdom to provide an insight and in this case to shed some
light on our emotional decision making quandary. Aristotle turns to the virtues of the
rational part of the soul. Aristotle claims that there are five virtues of thought, five ways
that we can obtain knowledge about something to assist with our practical goal of finding
out what is true and what is false and ultimately make a decision for. The five virtues of
thought and their meanings as stated by the Stanford encyclopaedia of Philosophy are:
• Technê: technical knowledge
• Episteme: scientific knowledge
• Phronesis: practical knowledge
• Sophia: theoretical wisdom concerning universal truths
• Nous: intuition
I am a firm believer of nous, intuition, emotional intelligence call it what you may. C.J.
Jung writes in, Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype,

“Emotion is the source of all becoming-consciousness. There can be no transforming

of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” (Jung 1938)

This quote resonates strongly with me. Since the publishing of the important work of
Rachel Carson in 1962, ‘A Silent Spring’, regarding the pollution of nature with toxic
substances such as DDT, humanity has known that we are doing something disastrously
wrong and often irreversible to the environment. Almost half a century has passed since
this keystone of environmental thought and awareness was published and today we are
still faced continually with a poisoning of the earth with now the consequences of a
globally changing climate. With much heated discussion being about climate change and
its affects to the globe and to the humanity itself, many in the environment game have
seen for decades that the same thinking and the same decisions that are being made are
continuing to pollute our pristine environments, extinguish species and diminish our
quality of life. If decision making is always going to be such a prescriptive affair will we
ever take that leap of faith that so many are pleading for?

What will happen to the possibility of transforming the darkness into light as Jung so
eloquently puts it?

And so again quandary and paradox sit in…

Most recently the New Scientist published an article about neuromarketing that quite
conveniently expressed the need for emotion in decision making.

“One of the most important (discoveries) is that our decisions are much less rational
than traditional economics suggests. "We find that emotions are really important,"
says Mirja Hubert, a consumer researcher at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen,
Germany. "Even rational decisions are not possible without emotion."” (New Scientist
2010)

If you think about spontaneous generation well it just cant happen, you need core
ingredients. Does this process of deliberative decision making provide enough of the
ingredients and conditions for a decision to be made?

It has been demonstrated that evolution however can take leaps and bounds and often in
an unexplained manner. I am not the first person to communicate the need for new
thinking to help humanity get us out of the mess we are in. What should we decide to do?

Do we draw a graph?

Do we weigh out the pros and cons?

Do we conduct a risk assessment?

In terms of the aforementioned excursion of deliberative decision making yes, for sure,
100% Conduct a thorough expedition to traverse the terrain of the decision at hand.
However to take that first step into the relative unknown, to show the leadership that is
necessary to go forth with that decision, is a graph or a grid really going to assist a person
at the critically vital point of that first step?

The quote that comes to attention is from Kurt Hahn the founder of Outward Bound, the
outdoor experiential education organisation who states,

“A ship is safe in harbour, but that is not what it is designed for!”

References Used:

Cline, P.B., 2004, Etymology of Risk, Masters Thesis, Harvard University

Jung, C.J., 1938 Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype
Lawton, G. & Wilson, C., Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy, New
Scientist, Issue 2772, 4 August 2010