Decision Making – Making Decisions

What types of decisions have you had to make?

• Tuckshop to buy?
• Subjects to choose at school?
• Career or job choices
• Which parent to live with
• When to euthanize a Pet
• When to speak up when you are being bullied or wronged
• Some of these decisions are tougher than others

Consider a persons decision to tamper with a cricket ball before a match…

What influenced their decision?

• Was time an influencer?
  • possibly…. they were certainly under time pressure to win the match… (did it achieve the desired result?)
• What was the risk?
  • Was the test match a high risk operation? Did their decision increase or decrease their risk exposure?
• Did culture play a part in this decision?
  • (This is the way we do things around here..)
  • What events lead up to this decision?
  • What was the culture of this team? (Allan Border, former cricket captain, “The Australian Cricket team is not a popular cricket team, and a lot of their antics on the field have upset a lot of people.)
  • Has the team ‘normalised’ their behaviour to the extent that they are immune to playing fairly?
  • Or did the cultural issues go much deeper than this team?
  • Could this issue be many years in the making and even stem back to the board???
• Does Cricket have a commercial pressure?
  • Was there a win at all costs mindset?
  • How much does winning mean to a national sporting team?
  • Does sponsorship increase this pressure?
• Was there a conflict of goals?
  • Were they being pulled in different directions?
  • Did they have to choose between doing what was right or winning at all costs? Values vs result.

This is a simplified decision making model of how high risk/ safety orientated industries, including aviation, make decisions.

Note the cyclic nature with the review of both: the initial Situational Assessment; and the influences of risk and time:

• The situation is assessed to identify the problem, time and risk involved.
• The type of decision that occurs depends largely on the time available and the risk involved. Creative decisions, on the far left, taking the greatest time; analytical decisions require time to analyse all the options; rule-based decisions are relatively quick; whilst intuitive decisions, on the far right, are the quickest types of decisions available.
  • Note: you may need to reassess the type of decision at this stage as the time available or the risk may have changed
• A course of action is selected and implemented before reviewing.