Decisions, Decisions (Welch, 2002)

The Art of Effective Decision Making

Welch, an academic, offers a nine-step plan for making effective decisions in everyday life and then demonstrates how to apply these steps to real world situations; these nine steps include identifying your objective, doing a preliminary survey of options, focusing on the values involved, assessing the importance of the decision, budgeting your time and energy, and making your choice. In developing habits of good decision making, we learn the importance of adroitly handling uncertainty; the author believes that the ability to handle uncertainty is the best predictor of success. Self reflection is very important in skilled decision making, and we also need to understand principles and strategies, money and probability, and some psychology, philosophy, and sociology, in addition to learning to assess the needs of others and their reaction to our choices. This is a "must read"--a thought-provoking book written for a broad audience in an easy and entertaining manner. Mary Whaley

Book Description
You're tempted to accept a promising job offer in another city, but moving would entail considerable sacrifice on the part of your family. What should you do?

Your elderly mother can no longer take care of herself but she doesn't get along with your spouse and dreads the prospect of moving into a nursing home. What is the solution?

Whether you're faced with decisions momentous or trivial, how you go about resolving everyday dilemmas will definitely affect your degree of satisfaction in life. In this engrossing and entertaining guide, David Welch, who has studied the decision-making process at the highest levels, shows how both the science and the art of decision making are essential to us all. Welch lays out nine steps to effective decision making and then shows us how to apply these steps to real-world situations. You'll learn how to assess your own strengths and weaknesses because self-knowledge is critical for making the right decisions.

This enjoyable, clearly written guide will enable decision makers to find the most practical solution for dilemmas both big and small.

p.13 You do not have to be a rocket scientist to be a good decision maker. Some of the most effective decision makers are people of just average intelligence. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that people of unusually high intelligence have more trouble making decisions. They tend to be more "cognitively complex," meaning they take a larger number of considerations into account than does the average person when trying to make a decision.

p.14 Whenever we make a decision, we do so according to a strategy, whether we are conscious of this or not.

p.32-44 The nine steps to effective decision making

1. Identify your objective

2. Do a preliminary survey of your options

3. Identify the implicated values.

4. Assess the importance of the decision.

5. Budget your time and energy.

6. Choose a decision-making strategy.

7. Identify your options.

8. Evaluate your options.

9. Make your choice - on time, on budget

p.67 Obviously, whenever you make a choice, you also make a series of choices about how to choose. You may do this explicitly or implicitly, but it is unavoidable.

p.69 There are five broad types of decision-making strategies: optimization, constrained optimization, satisficing, preselection, and randomization... There are many different ways of constraining an optimization, however. One could set the constraints fairly tightly, seeking to optimize over only a very small set of alternatives, or loosely, requiring a much more expansive search and evaluation... Not surprisingly, constrained optimization is a common decision-making strategy, because it can suit so many different kinds of choice problems. Knowing how to set the constraints in any given case is a great skill to cultivate.

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