MARK SCHOFIELD | Founder and Managing Director, MindAlpha

Accurate and effective decision-making sits at the heart of operational resilience. However, many organizations take it for granted and spend very little effort on trying to understand and improve it. History is littered with unexpected events and outcomes. What defines the winners and losers, when surprises occur, is the ability to process new information, make new judgments, and effectively adapt decisions. However, with an ever-increasing amount of information to process and ever more complexity and uncertainty in the world, the decision processes we have evolved are under siege. 

This article breaks down the decision-making process, explains how biases affect our judgments, and looks at how we can correct these. We describe how our decision-making processes change according to circumstances and discuss some of the cognitive factors that cause us to make suboptimal choices. Finally, we present a framework and tools that can help us make better decisions.