

Mastering the Art of Decision-Making: Part One
Issue 196, January 23, 2025
Uncertainty has become a defining characteristic of both our personal and professional lives in today’s rapidly changing unpredictable world. Stated simply, uncertainty is a certainty. From navigating disruptive markets and responding to global crises to contending with career challenges and family issues, decision-making under pressure has become a persistent and constant reality. Consider those impacted by the ongoing wildfires in California who were instantly thrown into uncertainty when home, stability and predictability were immediately destroyed. Not only were their homes destroyed, but so were the businesses where many of them worked and frequented. The lesson in mastering uncertainty is that although we may not always be able to control the conditions that impact our lives, careers or organizations, we can control how to respond to them.
The psychological factors, principles and ethics that guide sound decision-making are timeless. The goal for any individual or organization should be to reduce, if not eliminate unintended consequences by being hungry for enough relevant information; removing our own inherent biases; considering not just the immediate but also the future; and most importantly, being as objectively critical of ourselves as possible.
The Mechanisms of Decision-Making
At its core, the decision-making process involves taking in information (or using the information we already have), evaluating it based on our existing knowledge (recognizing personal past experiences, norms, values, beliefs and biases), and then selecting a course of action.
However, the reality is that we don’t make choices in a purely rational vacuum. A complex interplay of cognitive biases, emotions, and contextual pressures influences us, often without our conscious awareness. Think of your mind as a sophisticated but imperfect computer, constantly running decision-making software in the background. The computer relies on heuristics — programming shortcuts that allow it to make judgments quickly based on previous patterns. While these shortcuts are often useful, they can also lead it astray, especially in novel or complex situations. Consider today’s AI hallucinations, creating alternative facts or simply being unable to answer a prompted question. Humans aren’t much different than a computer or in today’s terms, a GenAI model. We are continuously running programming in our minds, often subconsciously, but always relying on our knowledge, past experiences and biases honed through time.
How We Make Decisions
According to Care Counseling, “Effective decision-making often involves striking a balance between rational analysis and emotional, psychological considerations. While logic helps evaluate options objectively, psychology provides valuable insights into our preferences. Integrating both can lead to better choices.” Understanding the psychology behind how we make choices can empower us to develop a strategic approach—one that embraces uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat.
When making a decision, Psychology Today states, “We form opinions and choose actions via mental processes which are influenced by biases, reason, emotions, and memories. The simple act of deciding supports the notion that we have free will. We weigh the benefits and costs of our choice, and then we cope with the consequences. Factors that limit the ability to make good decisions include missing or incomplete information, urgent deadlines, and limited physical or emotional resources.”
Unintended Consequences of Decision-Making Under Stress
When stress, anxiety, or emotional pressure influence decisions, the outcomes can often have unintended consequences. Our emotions skew our perceptions, lead to impulsive choices, and create ripple effects that may not be immediately apparent. We have written extensively about unintended consequences; please visit our newsletter archive to explore all relevant past issues of this newsletter.
- Short-Term Focus
Our human instincts cause us to think in the immediate. Consider a visceral need to get something to eat, seek medications to manage an illness, or in a business sense, respond to customers and make them happy. We don’t often look long-term; our default is to make short-term decisions influenced by mental and environmental factors, but they often come with unintended consequences.
Stress often overly narrows our focus, pushing us to prioritize immediate solutions over being strategic in our thinking and decision-making. We simply want to remove the immediate “stressor.” For example, a business leader under intense pressure from an organization’s board to cut costs might decide to lay off employees without fully considering how the loss of institutional knowledge and team morale could impact long-term productivity. While the immediate financial relief might be evident, the hidden costs often surface later in decreased innovation, compromised operations, and increased turnover.
- Paralysis by Analysis
Anxiety can overwhelm decision-makers leading to an over-reliance on gathering data and overanalyzing options to the point where decisions simply cannot be reached. Paralysis results when options are reviewed over and over again, and as time passes, opportunities may be missed, or a problem becomes considerably worse.
Consider a public health official faced with a rapidly spreading disease crisis (think Covid-19 or today’s Bird Flu). Fear of making the wrong or unpopular call might result in delayed or no interventions, exacerbating the crisis beyond the ability to mitigate solutions or effective approaches. The hesitation paralyzed by over-analysis highlights how stress-induced indecision can be just as damaging as impulsivity.
- Frayed Relationships and Trust Erosion
Decisions made under emotional strain often overlook any interpersonal dynamics at play. A manager under stress might hastily assign blame to a team member for a project’s failure. That stress may result from leaders holding the manager accountable. Or the manager may take a defensive position recognizing his or her own errors in managing the project and looking to deflect blame to others. Regardless of the motivation, stress-triggered decisions result in fracturing trust within the team. Objective accountability is the goal that respects interpersonal relationships and team/organizational dynamics.
- Reactive Over Proactive Behavior
Emotional pressure and too quick decision-making can lead decision-makers to respond with knee-jerk reactions, rather than proactively shaping outcomes. For instance, a company experiencing a crisis caused by an action or a product might issue a poorly worded apology in the heat of the moment, amplifying the damage without recognizing the customer’s or the public’s concerns or cares. Consider when Sonos released a new version of an app to operate their wireless speaker systems and denied the fact it didn’t work despite the inability of customers to control their systems. The denial communications from Sonos lasted for months leading to financial issues, breach of reputation and loss of market share. Or consider the self-righteous United Airlines’ crisis communications blaming a customer for being forcibly removed from a flight after refusing to give up a seat for a crew member, despite the videos captured by fellow travelers showing United personnel wholly at fault. In both these examples, showing vulnerabilities and taking responsibility can have better outcomes than blatant denials.
A New Year, a New Outlook
Take a pause to consider how leveraging critical thinking and recognizing potential reactions and responses can position an organization to proactively manage decision-making more productively in uncertain times. Customers have lost trust in brands and value individuals (influencers, etc.) as sources of information for decision-making.
Information is readily available, and groupthink can derail the best intentions in making decisions. Add to that, the hidden influences that can compromise good decisions.
As we move into 2025, the new year is a traditional time to set realistic goals. Embracing uncertainty and addressing it head-on as an opportunity is a strategy for success … and one that mitigates stress (and the anxiety it produces). Next week we’ll take the topic deeper with a playbook to help further master decision-making in uncertain times.
Get “The Truth about Transformation”
The 2040 construct to change and transformation. What’s the biggest reason organizations fail? They don’t honor, respect, and acknowledge the human factor. We have compiled a playbook for organizations of all sizes to consider all the elements that comprise change and we have included some provocative case studies that illustrate how transformation can quickly derail.