Better Decision Making – A Little Known Secret

Imagine that you are approaching a traffic light and need to make a decision whether to stop or move full speed ahead. This becomes easier to decide when you are given sufficient information – the light is red, orange or green. But how do you decide if the traffic lights don’t work for some reason. Now you need to process different bits of information about the traffic that’s coming from the left, the right, the pedestrians…

You know instinctively that a hasty decision might lead to an accident. So you process all available information before negotiating your way through the traffic intersection.

This provides some clues about how better decisions are made. The holding back of the decision is due to an appreciation of the consequences of a wrong decision. But the real key is the delay that gives time for additional processing and rationalization.

Neuroscientist researchers at Columbia University have discovered that postponing the making of a decision by even a fraction of a second can dramatically improve outcomes.

This is the first time that scientific research has actually confirmed that a slight delay in the decision making improves the decision making process. This gives the brain time to collect more information.

Now this does not mean postponing a decision when a quick decision needs to be made. Delaying a decision to improve the outcome has to be subject to some sort of speed-result balance.

Postponing the decision making process by even a small amount enables a number of things to happen:

-more time for the brain to get relevant information
-more time for emotional, knee-jerk reaction to give way to logic

Knee-jerk reactions are usually hard-wired into our behavior, based on years of conditioning. Impulsive decision making is usually based on this hard-wired conditioning. So any time taken to deliberate over the various options available and to collect relevant information almost always leads to better decision making.