Decision Making: A Risky Business? Or an Adventure?

I recently attended a facilitation workshop that focussed on assisting a group through the journey of decision making. It was very enlightening. The topic of decision making allowed for the echoing of my Mother’s wise and advisory comment from her life’s journey that,

“To make a decision is the hardest thing in life to do!”

This was the third workshop in a series in the art of facilitation. The opening quote by the facilitator used a grab of etymology that the ‘facile’ from the word facilitation, its root meaning is ‘to make things easy’.

So, if we have ‘decision making’ as the hardest thing to do, assisted by ‘facilitation’, something that is supposed to make things easier than this is destined to be certainly a marriage made in heaven. The first question that was issued to the workshop participants was,
“Why is it so hard to make a decision?”

The following reasons were voiced:
• It takes a public manifestation of ‘Responsibility’ to make a decision.
• To make a decision leads us most often to the realm of the unknown. A place where we don’t fully 100% know the outcomes of our choice.
• Sometimes we cannot go back from the decision that we make.
• The status quo may be rocked? The decision may cause upset. There is often an innate fear when initiating change.
• On a very basic level there is the notion of laziness. A new decision may have a ripple effect to other parts of the system and this may mean extra work.

Using the Buddhist based paradoxical statement that the only true constant in the universe is change, then decisions are an inevitable aspect of our existence if we are to stay true to the universal constant of change. Many in the realm of environmentalism believe that change in almost everything we do as a society, the way we think, our being and how our economic paradigm operates is what will save humanity and increase the quality of life for all on this planet.

The first technique demonstrated by the lead facilitator on this decision making journey was to map out the decision, the scenarios and the outcomes. Visually mapping out the impact of a decision allowed for a release of the anxiety, the fear of travelling to the unknown or uncharted waters. So rule one was to map the decision.


The next tool demonstrated was the values grid. Simple in means but rich in ends. Values Vs Effort. High value, low effort. Low value, high effort. High value, high effort. Low value, low effort. Immediately these four quadrants display a helpful decision making tool. If your decision fits into the High Value/Low Effort quadrant, the question is why wouldn’t you go forth with that proposal?

What emerged from working through this ‘Values grid’ was a conversation on what are the actual values to be selected and graded against?

And what are the various efforts that we are utilising to make explicit our decision making process on this grid?

It became apparent that it helps greatly for an organisation to be very clear of its own core values and definitions of efforts to aide in utilising the grid. Organisational values discussed included conservation potential, profit, reputation, experience, carbon emissions, resource efficiency, economy and reputation. Efforts discussed included time, resources and organisational/purpose fit.

During this section of the workshop my thoughts wondered to the work I had done for the communities of the Murray-Darling river basin. As part of assisting students to come up with action plans to assist their own communities, the environment and themselves, we asked the students to come up with a list of values that they felt were important. This ownership of values important to the self but also connected to the whole was critical in helping the process and ultimately the decision that was going to be made. This is where it may be useful as part of any facilitation journey that is deciding on an organisational decision that it should also acknowledge and include personal values. These I believe would have a two-way benefit of empowering the audience as well as assisting the whole process.

The next part of the decision making strategy was the introduction of a simple risk assessment, again using a visual tool. And again, very simple, a two axis graph, Cost Vs Probability (odds). This section of the workshop really got my neurons humming as I thought back to a presentation I was privy to regarding the etymology of the word risk. In Cline (2004), he states from citing the Ancient Greek origins of the word Risk that,

“Peirao is defined as: To attempt, endeavour, try to do, to try ones fortune, to make an attempt by sea, to make trial of one (Andrews, 1879).”

Juxtaposing this meaning elucidation to its modern day use there is a clear double meaning associated with the word risk. Cline represents this paradox in the following text,

“The duality of risk becomes clear in this definition, with authors often using the word to denote both danger and a bold or courageous gesture.”



Cline’s spanner in the risky works does add an extra dimension to the process of risk analysis. Cline does however provide assistance to this quandary of danger Vs adventure when using the word risk and conducting a risk assessment. He states quite forcibly that an organisation must come up with its own workable definition of risk.



“Looking into the future, the one constant that we know will exist is change. Technological, as well as social change, are facts of life and this means that more and more people are going to need help navigating uncertainty. Without a clear and balanced lexicon regarding risk and human interaction with uncertainty we face not only conceptual errors, but clear operational costs.” Cline (2004)


Back to the decision making adventure…

The facilitator made another strong point about the decision making process,

“Deliberation is important!”

So if you had to put a phrase to this whole process I would feel comfortable in using the stated term deliberative decision making. This I feel addresses one of the stated earlier apprehensions of decision making, that primal instinct of fear. If we have dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s and the journey of the decision made is transparent then this should alleviate the apprehension to go forth. A process has been used, haphazardness has been denied. We hope!

But is this decision making journey just all well too prescribed?

During the workshop a topic of big discussion was the role that emotions can play in making decisions.

“Who out there has in one instance or another, gone through the evidence and then whammo just gone with the ‘gut instinct' to make a decision?”

It is time now to again jump into the time machine and visit Ancient Greece and in particular the philosopher Aristotle. As a budding philosopher I find it always good value to reach into the depths of wisdom to provide an insight and in this case to shed some light on our emotional decision making quandary. Aristotle turns to the virtues of the rational part of the soul. Aristotle claims that there are five virtues of thought, five ways that we can obtain knowledge about something to assist with our practical goal of finding out what is true and what is false and ultimately make a decision for. The five virtues of thought and their meanings as stated by the Stanford encyclopaedia of Philosophy are:
• Technê: technical knowledge
• Episteme: scientific knowledge
• Phronesis: practical knowledge
• Sophia: theoretical wisdom concerning universal truths
• Nous: intuition

I am a firm believer of nous, intuition, emotional intelligence call it what you may. C.J. Jung writes in, Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype,

“Emotion is the source of all becoming-consciousness. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” (Jung 1938)

This quote resonates strongly with me. Since the publishing of the important work of Rachel Carson in 1962, ‘A Silent Spring’, regarding the pollution of nature with toxic substances such as DDT, humanity has known that we are doing something disastrously wrong and often irreversible to the environment. Almost half a century has passed since this keystone of environmental thought and awareness was published and today we are still faced continually with a poisoning of the earth with now the consequences of a globally changing climate. With much heated discussion being about climate change and its affects to the globe and to the humanity itself, many in the environment game have seen for decades that the same thinking and the same decisions that are being made are continuing to pollute our pristine environments, extinguish species and diminish our quality of life. If decision making is always going to be such a prescriptive affair will we ever take that leap of faith that so many are pleading for?

What will happen to the possibility of transforming the darkness into light as Jung so eloquently puts it?

And so again quandary and paradox sit in…

Most recently the New Scientist published an article about neuromarketing that quite conveniently expressed the need for emotion in decision making.

“One of the most important (discoveries) is that our decisions are much less rational than traditional economics suggests. "We find that emotions are really important," says Mirja Hubert, a consumer researcher at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. "Even rational decisions are not possible without emotion."” (New Scientist 2010)

If you think about spontaneous generation well it just cant happen, you need core ingredients. Does this process of deliberative decision making provide enough of the ingredients and conditions for a decision to be made?

It has been demonstrated that evolution however can take leaps and bounds and often in an unexplained manner. I am not the first person to communicate the need for new thinking to help humanity get us out of the mess we are in. What should we decide to do?

Do we draw a graph?

Do we weigh out the pros and cons?

Do we conduct a risk assessment?

In terms of the aforementioned excursion of deliberative decision making yes, for sure, 100% Conduct a thorough expedition to traverse the terrain of the decision at hand. However to take that first step into the relative unknown, to show the leadership that is necessary to go forth with that decision, is a graph or a grid really going to assist a person at the critically vital point of that first step?

The quote that comes to attention is from Kurt Hahn the founder of Outward Bound, the outdoor experiential education organisation who states,

“A ship is safe in harbour, but that is not what it is designed for!”





References Used:

Cline, P.B., 2004, Etymology of Risk, Masters Thesis, Harvard University
Jung, C.J., 1938 Psychological Aspects of the Modern Archetype
Lawton, G. & Wilson, C., Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy, New Scientist, Issue 2772, 4 August 2010