Decisions - The Sum Total of Our Choices - Part 1

If Jesus Taught At Harvard Business School Podcast

Decision making lies at the heart of our spiritual, personal and professional lives. Every day we make decisions. Some are small, domestic, and innocuous. Others are more important, affecting people’s lives, livelihoods, and well-being. Inevitably, we make mistakes along the way.
The daunting reality is that enormously important decisions made by intelligent,responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes flawed – we will look at some of the reasons later on.
What is strategic decision making? Strategic is associated with “having focus” and having a sense of purpose of direction and avoiding distractions - hence we are familiar with phrases like strategic analysis, strategic planning etc.
On the other hand – decision making can be regarded as an outcome of mental process (cognitive process) leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives.
Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output could be an action or an opinion of choice. Some of the key words to note which will comprise the components of tonight’s session are outcomes, mental process, selection, course of action, alternatives.

Decision making is not an event. It is a process, one that unfolds over weeks, months or years. One that is fraught with power plays and politics and is replete with personal nuances and institutional history; one that’s rife with discussion and debate; and one that requires support at all levels of the organization when it comes to execution.

In Part 1 of this discussion we shall be looking at the framework of the decision making framework and in Part 2 we shall explore further using Case Studies