We make 35,000 decisions a day!
According to multiple sources on the Internet, including some quite eminent sources (https://www.psychologytoday.com) the average amount of remotely conscious decisions an adult makes each day equals about 35,000. Which is an astonishing amount and may or may not be correct but consider this, we make 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone according to researchers at Cornell University (Wansink and Sobal, 2007). When you start to really think about it as consumers we have become used to a vast amount of choices, in fact, we expect them.
Every day we are faced with increasing numbers of choices:-
Which of the thousands of TV channels do you watch? Do you even watch live TV or something you’ve recorded, or something on the internet off youtube or have a netflix binge. The choices are endless.
How do you like your coffee? A latte’ a skinny latte’, an Americano, an espresso, flat white, the list goes on and on. What coffee shop do you get it from? Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Costa, Pret A Manger, local independent cafe? Even for something as simple as coffee we’re overloaded with choices.
Do you cook for yourself or choose to become a valued customer of your local takeaway? If you do cook, what do you cook? Is it a winter warmer or a summer salad. The choices are endless and go on and on.
You and I have been given a free-will and a multitude of choices in our lives. Each choice carries certain consequences – good and bad. This ability to choose is an incredible and exciting power that we have each been entrusted with. Choices compound – we see this most evidently in the choices we make with our spending and the way they collectively impact our personal balance sheet. These accumulated choices all work together over a lifetime to take us to various outcomes.
Individual choices that concern only ourselves – such as what to eat for lunch – will seemingly only impact us personally, as they pertain to the time they require, the cost, the impact to our taste buds, energy level and health, etc. However, when it comes to business decisions things become a little more complicated than choosing which type of coffee to drink, because the implications of making a decision that is wrong can have an impact far and wide, impacting not only the decision maker but the businesses staff, customers, investors etc.
Yet many business owners think about business decisions in the same way that they think about ordering a coffee from Starbucks. So why do we get so many business decisions wrong?
Not only do we sometimes get mixed up between decisions or problems, according to Ohio State University management professor, Paul C. Nutt, we only get about 50% of our decisions in our businesses right! Half the time they are wrong, so there is evidence that we certainly do have decision-making problems. Bad decisions were usually bad because two things were missing:
- adequate participation of stakeholders in the decision-making process;
- sufficient time spent generating a range of possible solutions.
Too often those who should have been involved weren’t, and solutions were proposed and acted upon too quickly. Often with disastrous effects!
A third reason that emerged from his research is that: too often, Business Owners make bad tactical selections ….. because they believe that following a proper decision-making process would take too much time and demand excessive cash outlays. In other words, business owners tend to shoot from the hip when making crucial business decisions.
So there are three good reasons why we might have decision-making problems:
- We don’t involve the key people who need to be involved
- We don’t generate enough alternatives upon which to base our choice of decision
- We don’t follow recognised and proven decision-making processes.
Of course, the question you’re going to be asking yourself is; ok you’ve pointed out that I might not be making the best decisions, how do I correct them? Well, the first place you might start is by attending my free webinar on the 18th of Feb where we’ll cover a simple decision-making process that will help you start making better business decisions. Just Click here to register. It’s not going to be a complete sell fest, that has never been my way, it’s all ‘meat and potatoes’ from start to finish and you’ll leave with a proven decision-making process. So register today..(Click here)
Twelve intensive half-day meetings.
