Cognition is our ability to think. It is the actual process of thinking. It includes gathering data, mentally weighing and measuring options, thinking through possible outcomes and coming to conclusions. Cognitive closure is the end of that process.
My wife is a teacher and I remember discussion we had when she was in school about Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. It is how the mind develops in stages of thinking from infancy to adulthood. He postulated that we acquire knowledge and organize that knowledge into usefulness at certain ages (in general). Some of his ideas have fallen into disfavor, but in general they tend to be correct. Most of your kids are taught specific subjects in specific grades based on his findings.
Cognitive Closure is the end of thinking. The desire for drawing conclusions and to have closure is higher in some people than others. Some people just need to have everything in its place. They need to know that there is no ambiguity and no unsolved mysteries or outstanding questions. There is even a test that you can take to define your need for closure.
This test surfaces the person’s need on a scale that addresses such things as:
- Their preference for order and structure
- The persons emotional discomfort associated with ambiguity
- Their impatience with regard to delayed decision-making
- The desire they may have for security and predictability
- Their close-mindedness.
Your level of desire for closure effects your decision making in that those who have a high need for closure seem to be more decisive when they reach a decisions. That may sound like a good thing, but they tend to use less information in their thinking. They tend to use obvious information and not do their homework.
The desire to reach a quick decision may work out well for most issues that come up and no one like people who over-think things. Taking two hours to decide what to eat for lunch would drive people crazy.
But not thinking it through on the larger decisions can cause you troubles. If you tend to move quickly on every decision at every level in the sale manner, then you may need to slow down, gather more information and think a bit longer on the big ones. Reaching a decision is imperative, but reaching it too quickly can sour your situation.
Bad Call!
It may be in your favorite sporting event that this accusation is made. You yell it at the Umpire in baseball, the Referee in US football, or maybe the local official of your child’s chosen sporting event. We are all subject to bad calls, not just sports officials. Thinking about the fast calls they need to make and how we over analyze them with slow motion and freeze frame cameras, I am amazed at how they get most of them right. Sure there are some that are wrong and some that change the outcome of an event, but most day in and day out calls are solid. Let’s give them some breathing room.
What if someone was looking over your shoulder at work and ready to scream “Bad Call” after you make a decision on some project or initiative. It would be stressful to think of working under that kind of environment. Some of us may actually be working in those conditions. Each day you may go to work thinking that someone will overrule your decision as if they had freeze frame views of what you are doing. Your boss may change your choices and take over your projects. That would be a tough environment.
We do make bad calls from time to time in our work and most firms and bosses are willing to forgive them as you learn from them. Employees who consistently make bad decisions soon find themselves without a position. Getting the right decision is key to making progress at your firm and in your career.
Sometimes we just blow it. We get it wrong and we may not even know why. What are some of the reasons we make bad calls? Can we avoid them if we know the traps we might fall into? Maybe… In the next few posts we will explore some of the influences and situations that may tend to produce bad calls. Stay tuned…
Making the Call (Selecting the best option)
You have gathered information and sifted through the piles of reports, documents, input from people and management perspectives. Now you are ready to make the decision.
Don’t hesitate
Making decisive choices is critical to getting things done in a timely manner. While it is hard to know exactly when you have enough information to act on , it is also hard to know when your decision is being slowed down as you wait for more data.
Make it Actionable and Extended
You need to move forward when you reach the point where you have actionable information and you have enough to think three to four steps down the road. You should have enough information to develop an Action Plan. This is a plan that is broken down in steps that can be completed by one or more people in stages. You breakdown the overall process of reaching the goal so that you can parse out the efforts knowing what the next 3-4 steps are in each area of the action plan.
Make it Adjustable
Things change and you need to be able to change also. You are ready to go when you have defined the actions needed and specific milestones where you can revisit the tasks and make changes as needed. Do not expect to pound through your action plan from start to finish without taking time at certain stages to see how you are doing. If you see changes needed, then make them. This is not to say that you can adjust “on the fly” as you see a better way of getting things done. It is saying that at specific points in your action plan you should step back to see how it is going.
Develop potential solutions
Now comes the step where you start brainstorming decisions and possible options that may generate positive outcomes. In a pinch you will move through these steps quickly. When you have time, you can think a little more on these items. Decision-making is not as involved as Strategic Planning, but it impacts your operations so you need to devote yourself to getting better at making decisions.
You could write these down so that you can take a look at them. The next step is thinking it through, so you need to prep for that. Make a list of the options. Don’t worry too much at this time about the best solution, just get them down on paper or sorted in your head.
You can throw out the obvious ones that will not fit your criteria for success. If replacing a server is not an option after a crash, then don’t list it. If swapping parts in a dead machine is an option – list it.
Once you have your list move to…
Analyzing the alternatives
Now take the list and review it? What might work and what might not? What cost money and what does not? What can staff do and what can they not do? What has worked before and what has not? What does management expect? What takes time and what is fastest?
The outcome should fall into your matrix for good decisions. Most of the time it will be success if it:
- Makes money for the firm
- Saves money for the firm
- Gets people back to work fast
- Preps for the long haul
- Expands operations
- Avoids the same problem in the future
- Advances your firms capabilities
- Falls within the company plans
- Gets the project out the door
- Makes you firm more marketable
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. There needs to be some focus on why you chose the route you want to take. You need to define and defend your decision.
If it is a mystery (as sometimes hardware and software problems are) then stack the options for recovery into priority. You don’t reformat a server hard drive because one file is lost. You start small and move to more invasive measures as you proceed.
By listing and analyzing your options, better decisions will be achieved.
When decision time comes there are always limiting items that come in to play. Knowing the limits and constraints will improve your decision making by placing boundaries around the extents of what could be done.
These boundaries may include time constraints that limit the time you can take in the progress of the change or repair. It might be money or funds. It might be manpower and limits on the number of hours you can spend in the effort. Whatever it may be, you have to take into account these factors.
Limits are placed on you by others, by your firm, by the marketplace or by regulations. Following the restrictions is critical. An example may be the disposing of electronic waste is not allowed by just throwing it into the dumpster. You cannot just toss those old monitors into the trash. You have to process them thru e-waste firms and drop spots.
When defining what you can do you have to take into account what you cannot do. Unlimited budget and time could make every decision easy, but that is not the reality most of us live in.
Our topic is decisions. As we all know, decisions are based on the available information you have to process prior to making the call. If you have very little information to go on, you run the risk of making the wrong choice. If you gather too much, then sometimes it clouds the water.
Some decisions are made on very few details and facts. They are obvious to all that the direction to choose if fairly obvious. Not much time is spent thinking about the choices and the outcome. Everyone quickly agrees to move forward.
But some decisions require greater levels of investigation and processing of data. These are the decisions I want to chat about.
Where do you get the data and information you need to make a large decision? How much data do you need? Who do you speak with?
Some of this is pretty standard stuff, so I will not spend a lot of time on it.
Search Online. Go to your favorite search tool and type in the info you are looking for. Use topic based searches, like “best plotters” or use related terms options in Google. Just an a tilde ~ to your search term, like “~plotters” and at the bottom of the screen you will see related searches that Google might think you should try. You can also just type out the entire question as if you were talking to someone, like “what is the best plotter for mylar output?” and be sure to dig a few screen in, not just the first page.
Read. More online stuff. Blogs, twitter feeds, websites, vendor sites, reseller sites. Just read as much as you can.
Talk. Talk to people in your firm and outside your firm. Talk to people who have been down the search road before you. Talk to the front line workers at your office. Talk to some of the on-line personalities that you have read from the prior step. You would be surprised that most of them will give you some advice via email.
How much? When you start to feel overwhelmed, you may have enough information. Review it and sift through it a few times. You may have some holes in your information spread that need to be filled. Reading it again may prompt more questions.
This is not an exhaustive list, just a good place to start.
You cannot decide what to do next until you know what or where there is a problem or opportunity for progress. Identifying these is the first step.
Problems and issues that come up are easy to identify. They present themselves every day and just need to be addressed. But what exactly are you looking for? Here is a way of narrowing the search for the real problem.
I look in five areas for my troubleshooting: (taken from my BAD CAD series)
The Files – This is the first place I look. Most often the file or an object in the file is corrupt. I need to find out if the problem is resident in the files as they were created, edited, plotted, etc. I look here first and spread my investigation to the following areas in order
The Machine – Next I look to the persons PC. Does the problem only happen on one machine? Is it a machine or system variable that is set incorrectly? Is it hardware troubles?
The User – I always talk to the user to find out what has happened, what happened before it broke and how they got to where they are. It is quite often a mistake, a misunderstood tool or a bad click that got them here.
The Server – Sometimes the network or server hardware acts up. Don’t forget to look here.
The Software – There are always “bugs” in the software. A tool that is not yet mature, not designed to be used in the way it is used or just not programmed correctly.
If it is not an obvious problem but rather a decision related to what might be done next, read my series on Strategic Planning.
Managers and line workers are called on to make decisions every day. Some are small and can be processed quickly and others are major efforts. Learning to make good decisions takes time and usually takes a lot of bad decisions into account.
How do you work through the decisions you make? Do you have a process or method that seems to work for you?
People differ in their approaches to making decisions and there is not one single effective tool that works every time. Sifting through information, defining boundaries, reflecting on issues and outlining a choice changes with every situation you may be involved in. That being said, there are some common steps in moving from undecided to decided.
Making decisions have the following general commonality be structured in the following steps
- Define the problem
- Gather information
- Identify limiting factors and constraints
- Develop potential solutions
- Analyze the alternatives
- Making the Call (Selecting the best option)
- Implement the decision
Each one of these steps can allow mistakes and misjudgments to creep in. If you add establishing a control and evaluation system then you have even more areas that may derail your efforts.
Making good decisions is a mix of art and science. The artistic side takes into account political climate, personalities, entrenched camps, bullies, overbearing bosses and much more. The science of it includes the gathering and processing of data, drawing conclusions, weeding out invalid perspectives and getting the raw information packaged for review.
Mixing these arts and sciences takes skill. Knowing which side is given more weight takes some thinking. Does strong data override political climate? Does a strong willed boss make your research irrelevant? When do you push forward even when others are pushing back?
We will discuss these issues and more in the coming posts.
I have written extensively on delivering the messages that Managers have to deliver. Here are a few links to read from my past writings
Can we talk? – Principles of CAD Management
Henri Fayol (1841-1925) was a French mining engineer who went on to become Director of Mines with over 1000 employees. His company flourished and was the largest producer of steel and iron in France during his days. In 1916 he published his perspectives in the book “Administration Industrielle et Générale”. Included in his […]
The Power of the Written Word
Communication is so valuable and written communication is the artifact and record of a good process. Writing is becoming a lost art for the common person. Go back 150 years and read the articulate correspondence of common farmers who had become enlisted men in the American Civil War. They are eloquent and full of great […]
Talk is Cheap – but so valuable
Communication is one area that can always be improved. Getting the message across to others is what every manager has to do. Communicating well and consistently is not easy. You may do a good job of communicating the message out, but you might not do it often enough or to the right people. Or you […]
Email Guidelines – A series of posts
Here are some general guidelines I use for email. I have developed many of these and collected them and just picked them up here and there. If I have copied them from the net and not given credit it is because I do […]
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