Introduction
This week’s MSLD632 blog
concerns the role emotions have in decision making, specifically the emotion of
confidence. Two situations are presented where a decision was made, one made
with extreme confidence and one with a significant measure of doubt. The idea
of confidence’s importance in decision making is smartly and firmly crafted by
Stanford Professor Baba Shiv, in the short video The Brain Research at
Stanford: Decision Making and provides the central support for assertions
made in this blog.
Decision to Not
Take a Vendors Advice
If you have been
following my blogs, then you know that we use a vendor to create a fault
isolation tool that is interactive and that we import fault isolation
procedures written in accordance with S1000D (industry wide authoring
specification). Before we began writing using the S1000D specification we
collaborated with the vendor supplying the interactive tool to devise a very
specific structure and choosing which elements and attributes of S1000D to use
to best match the design our vendor already had in-place with their interactive
tool. The design they originally proposed would mean authoring to a micro-level
we had never seen before and we believed not to be necessary and overkill.
Adopting their method would mean significant amount of work on our end, so
being a ‘good partner’ they succumbed to our insistence that what they were
proposing was just too much work.
The problem was that we
really did not understand how inflexible their tool was and because of the lack
of understanding of their tool, there was some level of doubt as to whether or
not the compromise would work. Besides, their track record on capitulating was not
favorable and was likely also a contributing source of doubt. To compound the
problem, the import tool the vendor was creating to parse the S1000D data into
their interactive database would not be ready for several months so meaningful
feedback would have to wait.
The doubt that existed affected
my team and most of all the most valued member. He persistently played the role
of the “high maintenance client” as described by Shiv (2011). In this role he
constantly challenged the direction the fault isolation effort was headed.
After watching Shiv (2011) the reason is quite apparent. The lack of confidence
of the decision killed any passion to be had in carrying out the tasks of
writing the procedures in S1000D and also keep the team from remaining focused
on the task at hand.
Decision to Take
the Vendors Advice - A New Attitude is Born
Once the import tool was
ready to begin accepting our S1000D fault isolation procedures, it became
quickly apparent that the order of the steps were out of sequence. They
provided a demonstration of the import process and suddenly it began to click
that there was a purpose to their original recommendation of authoring our
steps to micro-levels that we were not accustomed to, that we thought were
overkill. We provided the same S1000D fault isolation procedures to them, with
steps broken down an additional level. What do you think happened? Amazing how
smoothly the import went.
Having seen the light
and having a good understanding of their system allowed me to show confidence
in the decision that will create about 30% more work on our end. This
realization has come in just the past few weeks, so it will be important to
continue to show confidence to maintain the passion and the confidence
contagion that Shiv (2011) asserts is critical in successful implementation and
the “utility of confidence” synergies that is created by showing confidence.
Summary
Shiv (2011) provided
some very good guidance for a relevant decision that I recently made for my
team and organization. The virtues of confidence in decision making, where
solid decision making techniques were used, cannot be overstated. The next
decision you make, make sure to make it with confidence. If confidence is not
part of the equation, then consider rethinking, delaying or cancelling the
decision. You just might save yourself some trouble.
Reference:
Shiv,
B. (2011). Brain research at Stanford: Decision making [Video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRKfl4owWKc.
