The three secrets of decision making

The three secrets of wise decision making are courage, creativity, and balance in the management of complexity. The courage to be rational faces up to complexity in order to get the problem solved; creativity adds to complexity in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the problem; and balanced judgment evaluates complexity in an even-handed manner in order to reduce it to a choice of the single best alternative.

The warning signs of a need for greater courage are emotionality and resistance in response to challenging information. The paths toward greater courage are hope that a rational process will lead to the best outcome, appropriate emotional distance from the decision outcomes, and process orientation.

The warning signs of a need for greater creativity are coming up with no more ideas or coming up with the same ideas over and over again. The paths toward greater creativity are stimulus variation to vary ideas and force fit to turn the resulting new ideas into truly creative ones.

The warning signs of a need for more balanced judgment are a feeling of information overload, simplistic thinking, and vacillation. The paths toward more balanced judgment are external memory and priming as supplements to working memory and educated guesses and analysis into subproblems to simplify the problem in ways that eliminate the unimportant and retain the important.

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