On Decision Making and ‘Elephantine’ way of doing it

Decision making is one of the key personal/organizational skills – for decisions shape our futures. While thinking about this, I realized that the speed of making a decision is directly proportional to your desire to get to something. If you are not very keen about something, decision making will be a slower process.

A few more insights on this were:

• Every decision is a risk – since decisions are based on “just enough” information and not “all” information. “Just enough” is information that enables to arrive at a logical conclusion.
  Gut feeling still plays a very important role in decision making.
• Refusing to take a decision till you have “all” information is a bad idea – it just hampers progress – especially when market is competitive and volatile.
• Taking decision only on gut feeling is sure way to fail – decisions need to be supported by reasoning and logic.

In this context, it was interesting to read a management story (though it is an old one) on Elephantine Decision Making – I read it earlier and read it again today at Management Stories Blog. Here it goes –

A circus keeps a baby elephant from running away by chaining it to a stake. When the animal pulls at the chain the cuff chafes its leg, and the baby elephant concludes that to avoid pain it is best to stay put.

But when the elephant grows up, the circus still chains it to the same small stake. The mature elephant could now pull the stake out of the ground like a toothpick, but the elephant remembers the pain and is too dumb to use the new set of facts—how circumstances have changed. The tiny stake keeps a two-ton elephant at bay just as effectively as it did the baby.

Many executives are too dependent on old facts, on outmoded conventions, or are still basing decisions on what worked twenty years ago. This is elephantine decision making.

In my career span – I have seen numerous people who are victims of elephantine decision making. This generally happens when:

• One strongly holds on to past experience and what worked for them (e.g. When I was in XYZ company I did this and it worked – or I did that and it didn’t work)
• One does not keep his/her eyes/ears open enough for new ideas to come in. Business climate changes, market situations change and if you are not adaptive/open to these, you are bound to take decisions based on your limited knowledge. Ignorance, in this case, is not necessarily blissful.
• One is not connected – to right resources and right people. Reading contemporary material, keeping your eyes and ears open and connecting/networking to people is very very essential to break barriers of old thoughts and gain new insights. Unlearning and relearning has to be a constant process.

I have also seen people who are aware, connected and still fall prey to elephantine decision making just because they cannot come out of their mental comfort zone of what worked for them in past.

Decisions are difficult to make – so is the process to arrive at a sound decision.