All entries for Thursday 10 March 2011

Am I going to get MORE indecisive?

This module has provided a lot of food for thought so far. I especially always enjoy seeing the links between whatever we are working currently, and what we have seen before. For example, we spoke a lot in Leadership about the ability of leaders to make decisions, and how they should go about doing so, and now we are being given the methods for how. Similarly, we spoke about the difficulties using lessons learned effectively in our PEUSS PMA's, and that the main problem was that tacit knowledge was very difficult to consciously access. Now we see the effects that it can have when the tacit knowledge we hold is based on unconscious biases (related to the concept of mental models in Learning Organisations from CBE!), and these lead to decisions that might seem good at the time, but ultimately result in unforeseen problems.

I am very thankful that we had the chance to test our own judgement. I think that mine came out relatively well, in that I was right a little more than half the time (but don't tell my girlfriend that it was that low! :P), but it was relatively clear to me, and probably most of us, that we're not right about things nearly half as much as we think we are. System 1 lets us down, and that is where the need for System 2-type methods present themselves, of which we are currently discovering so much. However, I have a concern about all this - while it's good that I'm currently questioning a lot more of the decisions I make, is it counter-productive to question yourself constantly. If you can never rely on your System 1, that arguably makes your ability to respond to new developments in general much worse!

Still, I fully accept the need that it is better to question judgement, and understand our internal motivations, than blindly assume correctness, but it also makes it harder to function...

: 10 Mar 2011 14:04 |  Tags: Decision Making Mbe Rdm |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem