How To Make Good And Difficult Decisions – Bernd Erk

Suit or shirt, tea or coffee, cloud or on premise. Our whole life is a combination of conscious and subconscious decisions. They can be made through either an intuitive or reasoned process, or a combination of the two. Independent from the level of difficulty we fall victim to the same cognitive and personal biases. Especially personal and cultural decisions are sometimes hard to make, cause the establishment and enumeration of the underlying criteria is hard.

The technological developments of the last decade have made poor decision making easier, more immediate, and more widely consequential. A good understanding of your decision making process and well known biases helps you to make better judgment. That said the talk will give you a psychology overview about the process of decision making and common pitfalls. It will share some tricks to make the right choices and cases of invaluable weak criteria.

Transcript

1. How to make good and difficult decisions 2nd May 2018 – @devopszh - Zurich | Winterthur
2. Introduction
3. • Open Source Service & Support • Focused on Datacenter Solutions • Based in Nuremberg, Germany About NETWAYS
4. • CEO @ NETWAYS • Co-Founder of Icinga • DevOpsDays @gethash About Me
5. Why this topic is important (to me)?
6. How many decisions do we make in an average day?
7. 35,000 https://go.roberts.edu/leadingedge/the-great-choices-of-strategic-leaders
8. Fooood
9. Choices
10. To decide means to make choices
11. There are easy and hard choices
12. In an easy choice one alternative is better
15. Hard choices have advantages and disadvantages in different perspectives
16. Hard choices are hard because there is no best option
17. Example Job Search Small Company Big Company Less money More money Family atmosphere Strong hierarchy Limited advancement Advancement opportunities Remote work Commute
18. If technical comparisons like more, less, or equal don’t work it is a hard decision.
19. How to make good choices
20. Fooood
21. Avoid stress How to make good choices
22. Under stress the fight-or-flight mode is activated http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
23. Cortisol blocks the PFC and creates a “fog” in your brain https://www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/fb1/ein/PLA/Diplomarbeit_Julia_Fechtner.pdf
24. Under stress it is very hard to leave the comfort zone
25. Prevent decision fatigue How to make good choices
26. “Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making.” - The brain is like a muscle!
27. Shai Danzinger - http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889 Extraneous factors in judicial decisions “Fatigue increases the tendency to rule in favour of the status quo.”
28. Avoid perfection How to make good choices
29. There’s ”no” perfect solution
30. The magical number seven (plus or minus two) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
31. Bad things can happen while aiming for perfection
32. Strive for the ideal preserves a lot of cognitive effort and the potential for a stress blowout
33. Biases
34. Reall ?
35. Let’s do a test
36. Answer each question quickly!
37. Here we go!
38. 5 + 3
40. 9 + 2
42. 10 - 6
44. Quick
45. Think of a number between 5 and 12
46. Quick
47. You could have picked 6 8 12 7 10 5 11 9
48. I’m going to guess which number you picked!
49. Here it is …
50. 7 https://www.facebook.com/lasseburholt
51. Why?
52. Self-serving bias Biases
53. We do everything to maintain and enhance our self-esteem
54. Possible Solution I Create a good culture of failure
55. Possible Solution II Get older J
56. Confirmation bias Biases
57. We tend to be put off by * that make us feel uncomfortable or insecure about our view
58. Possible Solution I Watch out for the opposite
59. Possible Solution II Try to make friends
60. Cognitive fluency Biases
61. We often misattribute the sensation of ease about something to the thing itself. http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/07/how-cognitive-fluency-affects-decision-making.php
62. Because familiarity enables easy mental processing, it feels fluent. So people often equate the feeling of fluency with familiarity. http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/07/how-cognitive-fluency-affects-decision-making.php
63. Beauty-in-Averageness Effect https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/face-perception/the-beauty-of-averageness/
64. Possible Solution If it sounds (looks) good, be careful!
65. Sunk cost bias Biases
66. My personal “favorite”!
67. We want to make the investment worth our while https://litemind.com/sunk-cost-bias/
68. We become attached to our commitments https://litemind.com/sunk-cost-bias/
69. We fear failing and looking foolish https://litemind.com/sunk-cost-bias/
70. Possible Solution I Focus on future invests and costs
71. Possible Solution II Evaluate the status quo as if it was just another option
72. Recap
73. Be aware of Biases
74. Not making a decision is also a decision, cause others will make that decision for you
75. Make a decision and change it as often as required (and possible)
76. When there is no best choice we should create our own reason
77. Hard decisions are chances to decide what we want to be and to develop our character
78. netways netways netways www.netways.de blog.netways.de git.netways.de Thank You!