Engineered Decision making

This piece of a quick write up is for those who believe that decision making can be engineered, though the key for which is of course the calmness to handle the pressure, and cognizance to be aware of the situation and analyze it from the peripheral and not jumping directly into the centre.

Decision making is challenging at different levels, and most of us expect an ideal situation to happen, which hardly happens. As kids – we were always instructed what to do, and what not – plainly because the ‘cognizance’ part was missing as a kid and that is acceptable.

Growing up – we have all been exposed to multiple theories assisting us in ‘effective’ decision making. If you simply Google ‘decision making’ you end up with the search result throwing multiple theories for you.

I am targeting this write up for those who know what the process is, but find it difficult in the ‘evaluating alternatives’ stage. I have been there, and I recently found a simple solution which I am trying to share.

Have you ever felt WhatsApp stories are fun – because you see a lot of your contacts with strong social messages, and how strongly they will be soon coming back to life. One particular story, a couple of days back struck my attention.

“When facing a decision to take a choice, just toss a coin – it might not help you, but while the coin is in the air you will know what you want”.

Few words – coined together in a simple way showing us the strength of our mind.

Deciphering the sentence, it talks to us about the choices we have, and how favourable they are; I am only talking about the choices which are more favourable and less in comparison to each other, and not the undesirables ones. Only the above two confuse us, because as humans we 'desire' for the best of the best.

I was facing a similar situation in the recent past, and I had few choices in front of me, I wanted to take the decision, but the pressing factor here was the ‘time’ remaining to execute that decision. Time decided which choice was more favourable and less favourable.

I thought, why could we all not understand this in a simple way in our mind and when we get into this situation the next time, which could be tomorrow morning – we can find a quick solution.

The solution originated from the idea of digital logical gates which I had learnt as an engineering student.

For those who do not understand what is a logical gate, just like I didn’t when I was an engineering student – It is an idealised device which performs certain operations on one or two inputs and gives us one single output.

   

OR Gate				AND Gate
Inputs		Outcome		Inputs		Outcome
0	0	0/FALSE		0	0	0/FALSE
0	1	1/TRUE		0	1	0/FALSE
1	0	1/TRUE		1	0	0/FALSE
1	1	1/TRUE		1	1	1/TRUE

These are the two types of basic gates –OR Gate and the AND Gate.

OR gate table means – When both inputs are 0 the output is 0 (low/False); or can also be understood as – even if one of the input is 1, the output is 1 (true/high).

AND Gate table means – only when both the inputs are 1 (high/true) the output will be 1 (high/true); or can also be understood as – even if one of the input is 0 (low/ false), the output is 0 (low/false)

Now – relating this to our decision making challenges, 0 and 1 corresponds to choices in the process.

Less Favourable (0) and highly favourable (1).

So AND gate decision making is you must look for both choices to be favourable for the output to be favourable.

This is when you have time to implement the choices.

OR gate decision making is when time to implement the choice is less, you go with one most favourable choice. (I'll be happy if at least one happens).

So, when faced with a challenge to choose a choice – quickly think about the time in hand to execute it & the impact that will have on the outcome and decide if you want to make a OR gate decision or AND gate decision. It will keep things simple.