Bullet-proofing your decision-making skillset

Decision-making is one of the most important and role-defining skills in the leadership toolkit.

And this critical skillset is never more called for than during periods of uncertainty and change, because such times are crucial inflection points, paired with often highly-unfavourable decision-making climates. A robust decision-making skillset, then, is crucial to peak leadership performance.

To bulletproof this crucial leadership skill, take a neuroscience-led view.

Insights from neuroscience will deepen your appreciation for what is going on beneath the surface in times of challenge. This understanding will help you generate new ideas for how best to approach the thinking in those crucial moments, as well as offer you mental strategies to enhance and fortify your decision-making capability.

The brain-based complexity of decisions

A decision is a complex operation requiring significant cognitive resources, relative to other types of thinking. In particular, there are 3 key neuro-based insights that are useful for “The Brain-Based Leader”:

1. Decisions requires significant cognitive resources.
2. Threat states significantly impact decision-making.
3. Decisions are less rational, and more emotional.

Given these complexities …

We unconsciously make use of shortcuts, including bias and assumption. We often rush to a decision without the proper consideration it perhaps requires, just so we can escape the uncertainty without incurring the cognitive workload. Oftentimes, we avoid making decisions all together, preferring instead to put them off, sometimes indefinitely!

These circumstances can significantly hamper decision-making.

This holds, even in favourable decision-making circumstances. At times of challenge and crisis, the negative impact is even greater.

Negative impacts of challenge and uncertainty

During periods of crisis and uncertainty, the brain will often be in or close to its threat state. When in a threat state, the brain downgrades its own thinking function, diverting resources to the threat and the body’s readiness to respond. We have literally less cognitive resources available to put into the decision-making demands of the situation.

In that threat state, we’re beset by other impacts: Our perspective narrows; we are more pessimistic than usual; we tend to limit ourselves to a surprisingly small set of solution options, regardless of the variety of the challenges in front of us.

Again, these circumstances, unchecked, can significantly degrade our decision-making capability.

Forget rationality!

From a large body of research, developed since the 1970s to the present day, we have learnt that our decisions are not rational. We rely far more heavily on our emotions and on social influences than previously thought.

This shouldn’t be disappointing news. Emotion is a decisive piece of the decision-making puzzle. Emotions help guide our behaviour. They give us the all-important final nudge to choose one option over others. And the social element can help introduce outside perspective.

But social conformity and emotional charge have negative consequences for decision-making, too, often swaying us away from the preferred decision we would have taken, had we not been influenced by outside actors or overly-triggering emotional states.

Emotion and social conformity, along with cognitive complexities and threat-state impacts, make for challenging situations for leaders faced with critical decisions at critical junctures.

3 lessons for the Brain-based Leader

So, 3 key lessons for you, as a Brain-Based Leader, to take into your decision-making matrix:

#1. Be mindful of ENERGY when making decisions.
Look after your resource health to ensure you have the fuel to make decisions. Be aware also of the timing of your decisions: is decision-fatigue playing a role? Is this the right moment to take this decision, or better to postpone?

#2. Prioritise EMOTIONAL REGULATION and managing state.
When stepping into any decision, take a moment to emotionally regulate with cognitive change tools like “Threat Level Awareness”, “Symbolic Labelling” and “Direct Experience”. (Message me for links to resources on these tools.)

#3. Be aware of the NON-LOGICS at play in every decision.
What assumptions are you making? What bias might be influencing your decision? Is social conformity a factor? If you could take emotion out of the equation, would you come to the same conclusions?

Take a moment to consider the brain-based factors at play in your decision-making template. And with the benefit of these neuroscience-led insights, consider what changes you might commit to making to your default decision-making process.

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