3: Decision Making Flashcards
What are the 4 key design choices for the decision-making process?
- Composition
- Context
- Communication
- Control
Questions to determine 1. Composition
- Who should be involved in the process?
- Who has relevant knowledge and expertise?
- How will they be involve?
Question to determine 2. Context
- What are the norms and ground rules for the group?
Question to determine 3. Communication
- How will the individuals interact with one another?
Questions to determine 4. Control
- How will the leader control the process and the content of the decision?
- How will the leader make the final call and communicate the rationale?
What are the attributes of a quality decision-making process?
- Conflict
- Consensus
What are the benefits of conflict?
- Leads to critical thinking
- Generates multiple alternatives
- People will ask more questions and offer differing opinions
What are the two forms of conflict?
- Affective
- Cognitive
Define affective conflict
Involves personal friction, personality clashes, and outbursts - caused by lack of curiosity and stakes positions
Define cognitive conflict
Involves debate about the issue
How do you encourage cognitive conflict?
- Establish ground rules
- Clarify roles
- Ask curious, non-threatening questions
- Revisit key facts
- Gain agreement in small areas
- Create scenario where parties must argue for their opponents’ positions
What are the benefits of consensus in the decision making process?
- Improves odds of smooth implementation
- People are invested in how the decision was made
What are some techniques to create consensus?
- Provide overview of plan to make a decision
- Refrain from stating your initial position as the leader
- Engage in active listening
- Explain the rationale for the decision
What is system 1 thinking?
- Quick
- Instinctive
- Automatic
- Emotional
What is system 2 thinking?
- Rational
- Slower
- Complex decisions
- More logical
What are some risk-related biases?
- Availability heuristic
- Representative heuristic
- Base rate neglect
- Law of small numbers
- Not recognizing randomness
- Anchoring and adjustment
Define availability heuristic
Decision makers likely to overestimate unlikely events if associated memories are vivid
Define representative heuristic
What is more cognitively accessible in the mind is more prevalent
Define base rate neglect
Decision-makers fail to take into account base-rate information
Define law of small numbers
Decision-makers often fail to take into account sample size in determining the stability of percentages.
Define “not recognizing randomness”
Examples include WW2 bombing of London, ”hot hand” in basketball, and ”cancer clusters” – also sequence of patterns
Define anchoring and adjustment
A phenomenon wherein an individual bases their initial ideas and responses on one point of information and makes changes driven by that starting point.
Define illusory superiority
When the majority believes that they are better, more likely to succeed, or more skilled than the average
Define the Dunning-Kruger Effect
A cognitive bias where people who are low in an ability do not recognize that the are in fact low on that ability and overestimate their likelihood
