Why the emotion?

Decision making is tough. The complexity and complication of the circumstances make it difficult, combined with sometimes the irreversible nature of the decisions and the potential impact such decisions have. As Ken Levine, the American screenwriter, director, producer, and author posited, “we all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.“

Indeed, emotions further amplify this already difficult task of decision making. Whilst a lot of decision makers either fail to recognize the emotional input of their decision making or attempt to ignore or deny them, emotions have come to play a central role in how decisions are made and the eventual alternative that are selected for action. Emotions impact important elements of the decision making process like interpretation of the problem, the range of alternatives evaluated, how those alternatives are evaluated and sometimes, even significantly impact the framing of the objective of the decision. According to Salma Stockdale, the communications expert and author, “we may think that our decisions are guided purely by logic and rationality, but our emotions always play a role in our […] decision making process.”

It is also not unusual for emotions to play a part in delaying decision making. The late James Esdras Faust, an American religious leader, lawyer, and politician captured this in his thought, “some of our important choices have a timeline. If we delay a decision, the opportunity is gone forever. Sometimes our doubts keep us from making a choice that involves change. Thus, an opportunity may be missed.”

One of the main learnings from Analysis of Business Problem course on our Executive MBA programme at the Lagos Business School is how to recognize and minimize emotions in decision making. It is understood that emotions cannot be completely eliminated from human decision making process, nor is it encouraged to attempt to completely eliminate so as this will be impossible. However, the decision making frameworks thought are aimed at minimizing emotional input into various decision making scenarios.

We were thought about the five typical decision making contexts – simple, complex, complicated, chaos and disorder, and how the difficulty levels increasingly escalate along those contexts. Indeed, the value of decision making also escalate along with the contexts, and as one would expect, the emotional charge and its impact on the decision making process.

One thing I found fascinating learning about these frameworks, decision making process and how business leaders go about arriving at the eventual decision was how the decision making process tend to considerably change if the decision was framed as abstract, with no real world impact. When leaders were presented with real life situations, similar to those encountered by real businesses, but framed as a game in an alien land, it was found that the decision alternatives the leaders came up with and were willing to consider vastly broadened and in some instances, differed considerably from those they favoured when they thought the impact of the decisions were more real.

This will suggest that the less emotionally charged a decision, the more robust the decision making process and potentially, the decisions themselves. Put differently, “truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking”, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker.