4 Steps to Making Quick Decisions
The following contribution is from the Lead Change website, a leadership-focused media outlet with a unique editorial focus on driving change within organizations, teams, and individuals. It seeks to inspire readers to take a leading role and serve wherever and whenever leadership is needed, offering real, concrete advice on how to grow. Lead Change is written by and for top leadership and business professionals from around the world. The author is Kay Peterson, founder of the Experiential Learning Institute, a coach, and organizational development consultant. Kay lives as a lifelong learner and brings her clients an approach based on curiosity, creativity, and inspiration.
Topics
Daniel Kahneman, fast thinking, iPad tips, reflection, slow thinking
If you find yourself in a situation where you need to make decisions quickly, you may find that you react differently than you would if you had more time to consider your options. I was recently reminded of this familiar situation when I was at a local coffee shop that uses an iPad screen for payment.
After the waitress took my order, she rotated the iPad screen, allowing me to sign and tip while she and all the other customers in line watched.
I was forced to make a snap decision in public. I chose to be generous. It was only later that I realized my generosity hadn’t been genuine. Instead, it was the desire to have a good relationship with the server and the others in line that motivated my ridiculous tip.
Others have noticed this awkward moment as well. A recent WSJ article commented on the awkward etiquette of iPad tipping. Customers say these devices «encourage you to leave a larger tip than normal» because the servers are right there watching, and you want to please them.
If you’re like most people, you want to be generous with the servers; But does it make sense to leave a $2.50 tip for a $5 order carried less than two feet from the coffee shop to the counter?
When you’re forced to think on the fly, your «fast thinking» can cause you to question your judgment after the encounter.
Compare this to how you think when you have time to be slow and deliberate, such as when you carefully plan a major purchase.
Daniel Kahneman defined these two ways of thinking in his 2011 book, «Thinking, Fast, Thinking Slow.» Kahneman describes the fast-thinking, experiential self and the slow-thinking, remembering self, combined in the four-step process below.
Fast Thinking vs. Slow Thinking
The fast-thinking method includes the experience and action steps (steps 1 and 4 below).
In this method, you act largely outside of conscious awareness, using your intuitive, bodily mind to manage direct, concrete experience in the immediate, specific context.
Compare this to slow thinking (reflection and reflection, steps 2 and 3 below), in which memories of specific experiences are used and interpreted through reflection and thought.
Certainly, each of these two methods is useful in different contexts.
– The fast thinking method helps you respond immediately to a complex, dynamic context.
– The slow thinking method allows you to disconnect from the context to carefully analyze and consider proven methods.
You can combine these two cycles to make more effective decisions that allow you to learn from each experience.
By making this process explicit and using the four steps in this decision-making (and learning) cycle, you increase your chances of making an effective decision on the fly, even when others are watching you.
These four steps will allow you to balance the tension of paying attention to the relationship and following some rational rules; pausing momentarily to analyze the situation and acting deliberately.
If you are not satisfied with your decision after making it, you are likely skipping one of the steps.
You can also apply this simple method to other decisions in your work and home life that seem to trigger remorse.
Instead of rushing into an immediate, unconscious response, take a few extra seconds to make informed decisions.
That way, even if you decide to leave a 50% tip, you’ll be doing so with deliberation, not guilt.
On-the-fly Decision-Making in Organizations: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Directions
The following contribution is from the Science Direct portal and the authors are Stefania Mariano and Benjamin Laker
– A systematic literature review is conducted.
– Factors influencing on-the-fly decision-making in organizations are identified.
– The proposed framework includes four groups of emergent factors.
– These include organizational, job, task, and individual-related factors.
A research agenda is proposed to guide future studies on on-the-fly decision-making.
Abstract
This study systematically reviews the literature on individual on-the-fly decision-making in organizations and presents an organizational framework to guide future research.
The proposed organizational framework comprises four groups of main factors that emerged inductively from the analysis.
These include organizational, job, task, and individual-related factors.
Furthermore, this study proposes an agenda to guide future research aimed at reconciling existing conflicting explanations and closing research gaps.
Finally, this study has implications for managerial practices.
Introduction
People in organizations often face a multitude of ambiguous, novel, or urgent circumstances that require them to make important decisions on the fly; that is, the action or process of quickly reaching a conclusion about the matter at hand (Oxford English Dictionary).
The ability to make such decisions, especially in highly dynamic, unpredictable, or critical situations (Mendonça and Wallace, 2004; Perlow et al., 2002; Tabesh and Vera, 2020), is crucial because it affects organizational processes (Bartkus et al., 2022), customer satisfaction (Crossan et al., 1996), and overall organizational performance and success (Adomako et al., 2021).
Consequently, academic research on how people make decisions on the fly has expanded markedly, exploring diverse aspects and evolving in several independent directions. For example, individual factors, such as cognition (Laureiro-Martínez and Brusoni, 2018), that influence individual decision-making processes within organizations have been investigated.
Links between job or task attributes and decision-making processes have also been examined. For example, the influence of position or seniority (Hodgkinson et al., 2016; Nemkova et al., 2012, 2015), or whether task novelty or ambiguity (Robinson et al., 2017) influence spontaneous decision-making within organizations.
Finally, researchers have investigated how organizational characteristics, such as organizational structure (Hamzeh et al., 2019) or support systems, including delegation or empowerment systems (Roux-Dufort and Vidaillet, 2003), influence individual spontaneous decision-making within organizations.
While these lines of research have focused on different areas, they complement each other.
A proper synthesis that unites them represents an opportunity to overcome current fragmentation by integrating scholarly work to provide a comprehensive understanding of current inconsistencies, discrepancies, and deficiencies.
Furthermore, it can facilitate the advancement of future scholarly work by providing a detailed description of the factors that influence people’s spontaneous decision-making within organizations.
The above represents the purpose of this study, which is based on the following research questions:
(1) What factors influence spontaneous decision-making within organizations?
(2) What areas of research require future investigation related to spontaneous decision-making processes within organizations?
To answer these research questions, we systematically review and organize the current literature into an organizational framework that seeks to guide future scholarly work and inform managerial practices.
This framework encompasses four groups of factors: organizational, job, task, and individual-related factors. These clusters of factors emerged inductively from article analysis and were proposed as categories that influence snap decision-making within organizations.
The results of this study are important for scholars as they provide a holistic understanding of the factors that influence snap decision-making within organizations.
The synthesis of this study has the potential to highlight current fragmentation, conflicting explanations, and existing research gaps, and to suggest a research agenda to guide future work.
Furthermore, this study is relevant to managerial practice as it provides a clear understanding of how managers can facilitate or hinder snap decision-making within organizations.
In this study, the terms «snap decisions» and «snap decisions» are used interchangeably. Thus, the current academic understanding of rapid decisions—characterized by the comparatively short time lag between the first reference to action and the subsequent commitment to action (see Eisenhardt, 1989, 1990; Judge and Miller, 1991), or the relatively short time lag “between planning and execution” (Hamzeh et al., 2019, p. 62)—is extended to encompass this study’s conceptualization of “on-the-fly decision making” within organizations.
Furthermore, this study’s analysis focuses on the individual rather than the hierarchical level.
This choice was made to provide the most accurate representation of the reviewed articles, with the intention of developing a concise, general organizational framework with potential broader applicability across different organizational settings.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 presents the theoretical discussion.
Section 3 discusses the methodology employed to systematically review the management and organizational literature.
The emerging findings are then presented and analyzed in Section 4. 5.
On-the-fly decision-making in organizations: An organizational framework, 6.
An agenda for future research on on-the-fly decision-making in organizations, constitute the research agenda.
Finally, Section 7 presents the limitations, implications, and conclusions of the study.
Excerpts from the section
Toward an Understanding of On-the-Fly Decision-Making in Organizations
In organizations, people often face circumstances that require on-the-fly decision-making.
In such situations, what factors influence on-the-fly decision-making?
Scholars have extensively investigated decision-making processes, presenting alternative perspectives on how people make decisions.
These perspectives range from instinctive and emotional decision-making processes to more deliberate and logical approaches, a dichotomy highlighted in dual-process theories.
Methodology
A systematic literature review (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009; Tranfield et al., 2003; Webster and Watson, 2002) was conducted to identify, select, retrieve, and analyze peer-reviewed articles and report the findings. To this end, a three-stage, multi-step review protocol was developed.
Findings
The following subsections analyze the findings that emerged inductively from the systematic literature review and address the following research question: What factors influence on-the-fly decision-making in organizations?
The first subsection presents descriptive statistics, including the total and cumulative annual publication frequency (1973–2022), publication media, article type, level of analysis, and the theories employed. The following subsections describe the emerging factors.
On-the-fly Decision-Making in Organizations: An Organizational Framework
The framework includes four groups of emergent factors:
(1) Organization (i.e., organizational structure, support, memory, and training)
(2) Job (i.e., role, responsibility, seniority)
(3) Task (i.e., complexity, ambiguity, urgency, novelty, relevance)
(4) Individual factors (i.e., age, cognitive ability, improvisational ability, propensity for creation, and emotions).
The Capacity for Improvisation
An Agenda for Future Research on On-the-Go Decision-Making in Organizations
The following subsections address the second research question: What areas of research require future investigation related to on-the-go decision-making processes in organizations?
The first subsection proposes potential avenues for future research, expanding the current understanding of on-the-go decision-making in organizations.
The second section proposes potential avenues for future research to reconcile existing conflicting explanations of the factors influencing on-the-go decision-making.
Limitations, Implications, and Conclusions
This systematic literature review presents limitations related to its management scope, reflected in the review protocol, which does not include other related fields such as psychology, behavioral economics, or behavioral sciences.
It is limited by the inclusion/exclusion criteria applied, as well as by the nature of the data analysis, i.e., the inductive method.
Other limitations include the journal’s accessibility and the omission of alternative databases that could have generated a different list of author contributions.
CRediT Author Contribution Declaration.
Stefania Mariano: Writing (review and editing), Writing (original draft), Visualization, Project administration, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Benjamin Laker: Validation, Conceptualization, Writing (review and editing).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declare no known financial conflicts of interest or personal relationships that could have influenced the work presented in this article.
Stefania Mariano, American University of Sharjah. Stefania Mariano is an Associate Professor of Management at the School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah (UAE). She earned her PhD from the University of Molise (Italy). She has lived and conducted research in Canada, the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Her research interests focus on knowledge dynamics, organizational knowledge, and behavioral knowledge.
Decision-Making Process
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Best Information Management Solutions – Business Decision-Making Process
Decision-Making Process
One of the key researchers in the field of management and decision-making was Herbert Simon.
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