What is Decision Making Process? How can it help us in our daily lives?

Decision Making Process

It is a thoughtful process of selecting different choices among all available options. Every decision making process results in a final form of action or opinion. If a person neither likes to take an action nor to give his opinion, this will also be counted as his decision. Decision making is an important skill for business and life. A person can be able to make a good and effective decision by: he will identify the real and exact problem because decision making starts with the existence of problem, he will have to identify the factors which will affect the decision like; chances of success or failure, desired outcomes, costs I terms of time and money etc. on the basis of these factors decision maker will decide that which option or alternative he should choose.

The decision maker will then assign weights to each factor involved in decision criteria is of equal importance in order to place those factors in the correct preference order. After that the he will develop different alternatives without any kind of evaluation so that he can choose between all the available options/ choices. Alternatives will be analysed on the basis of decision factors and their assigned weights.

The decision maker has weighted the alternatives already so he will just compare the alternatives and will choose the best alternative to maximize his benefit. When an alternative has considered to be chosen according to its significance and relevance, a decision should be made based on that alternative and thereafter implemented. If the decision involves other people like customers, colleagues, employees, he will ask them about the effectiveness of the decision in order to evaluate his decision. He can evaluate the decision by his self by checking that whether the desired outcomes has been achieved or not, if not then where something have went wrong in either of the steps of decision making.

Manager as a Decision Maker:

It is quite obvious that decision making plays a vital role in success or failure of an organization. Managers are called decision makers because they deals with planning like defining objectives and strategies to achieve those objectives; organizing for example how the structure and centralization will go on; leading, effective productivity of team and motivational style of leadership are likely examples of leading; controlling like what and how activities should be controlled in the organization.

Rationality:

A Manager will always make decision and choices which will maximize his benefit and interests. He will identify the problems and the alternatives very clearly and logically. We can say that manager will use the greedy approach to maximize the payoff for his organization.

Bounder Rationality:

This is a notion that individual decision maker are limited by the constraints like lack of information of all the alternatives, finite amount of time for decision to make and limitation of their mind. It complements rationality as optimization.

Intuition:

Managers being decision makers often rely on intuition which is to make decision on the basis of their personal judgments, personal experience and based on feelings and emotions rather than analysing the whole block of data or by running a proper survey which leads to the correct path.

Problems and Their Decisions:

While doing the job mangers have to face different kinds of problems, we may call them structured or repetitive problems in which problems are very clear and straight forward and the goal of decision maker is understood and the decision/solution to these problems is self-evident. While solving these kinds of problems one may use procedure, rules and policy decisions to solve them.

On the other hand manager can face unstructured problems which are innovative and not of the routine problems. These are unclear and ambiguous problems. While solving these problems mostly managers rely on non-programmed decision to come out with a unique solution. The solution of these problems needs long time frame, judgement and creativity.

Conclusion:

When you have to come to make decisions for an organization you must judge the positive and negative business results and should always go for the positive side. You must use the above explained eight steps of decision making to achieve the desired goals and benefits.

Learning Outcomes:

We always make decisions in each and every aspect of our lives. It is very important to make efficient and affective decisions to get success in our lives, no matter we use proper analysis alternatives or we use the intuition. Making the decisions and accepting its results is the one and only way to stay in control of you precious life.