The New Book “Decision Master” Introduction Chapter 3: Digital Decision-Making Styles

Due to the complexity, ambiguity, and unpredictability of the digital business dynamic, it is not possible to make effective decisions via pure gut feelings or theoretic approach. Individually, it needs to leverage analytics and intuition, philosophy and methodology, principles and practices, substance and styles. Collectively, it is better having a mix of complementing mindsets, skills and decision-making styles in the room. People with different personalities approach decision making in a different way, decision-making style is also situational. Which style do you have to make decisions? And how to improve decision-making effectively?
Information-based decision-making: Decisions are based on information and generate information. Information and decision-making are intimately connected and interdependent, this is particularly true in the digital era. Though information as input to the decision-making does not absolutely determine the decision but allows the decision-maker to practice analytical thinking and exercise their judgment. More often than not, the decision-maker must have enough knowledge to make their decisions rich in information and significantly different from the available data. Information is the lifeblood of businesses, and decision makers are the information agents who can master information to capture not only just knowledge but business insight, well mixed with the right amount of guts in order to make effective decisions.
The hybrid decision-making style: Information allows you to build an actionable insight on how to move from one level to the other; it applies to the context and environment in which decisions are made. However, information has its own limitation, to make sound decisions in fact of today’s uncertainty and ambiguity of the digital new normal, intuition is also important. Intuition or being intuitive is when you have a gut feeling about something. It is when there isn’t an exact answer to the puzzle because you don’t have all the pieces. An intuitive mind has the strength and willpower to follow the courageous heart if with the right information, has the better chance to make decisions effectively. Information + intuition drives awareness, which can include all of these characteristics, uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy, although they can also trigger a sense of confidence, confirmation, validation, verification, with the goal to improve decision-maturity.
Participative decision-making: Decision-making is both art and science. Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But in practice, each person has their own cognitive strength, knowledge limitation, background, or experience, So besides independent thinking and structural decision-making scenario, we should always collect feedback and involve the right people for getting complementary insight in making better decisions. Communicating to others raises the total cognitive threshold to fill decision-making blind spots. It also allows new pieces of information to be synthesized to generate new knowledge and fresh insight for filling blind spots in making effective decisions. Participative decision-making can also help to remove decision-making bottlenecks via leveraging expansive thinking and cross-functional communication and collaboration.
The point is that there is no one size fits all formula for all decision making; there are all sorts of decision-making styles depending on the decision maker’s cognitive ability, knowledge, insight, or personality. The businesses and the world become more complex, uncertain, so decision-making also becomes more complex, as the matter of fact, there are so many reasons decisions could be bad. Digital is the age of people, in complex operations and organizations, group dynamics leads to final results and performance, and collective wisdom provides the necessary inputs to make better decisions.Follow us at: @Pearl_Zhu