Decisions making process…is it facts or intuitions? Part 1

Decisions ..Decisions..Decisions..What is the right methodology to make a good decision?
When a manager doesn’t make a good decision, he may be blamed that he didn’t get all the facts before he took that decision; but does having all the facts at hand leads to a good decision making? We also hear the phrase “I just had a good feeling about this”, or “I just had a bad feeling about that.” Managers do make their decisions based on guts feeling.
As a manager in charge of decisions making, how do I make my decisions? Do I use facts alone? Do I mix my feelings with that? Do I wait for a good sign before I make my decision? Do I wait for a happy day?

There are three schools of thoughts when it comes to decisions making:
1-Don’t look back just think about the future; basically make your decisions as you go.
2-Don’t look back, but make sure you make what happened in the past a guide to your future decision making process.
3-Look what happened in the past; learn from history, “never again”, this school of thoughts depends heavily on what happened in the past to make any future decisions.

Which three schools of thoughts have the most credible decision making process? Which decision making process is the most successful at arriving at the right decisions? Each of the three above has their won success stories to tell.

You may hear many managers claim that their decision are based only on facts in front of them, but I don’t find that to be entirely true, there are always emotions, intuitions, believes, characters..etc, that are involved in the decision making.

If you read the history of the great pioneers, we find one thing common in their decision making process “they didn’t have a past experience or much information at hand to use as a guide to their new endeavors”; they had to make their decisions as they moved along. As they paved their path to the new frontiers, they wrote their own history. One great example of this decision making process is the space exploration program…

To be continued…