Making tough decisions is critical to successful problem solving
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**DECISIONS ARE EVERYTHING!**

When faced with a set of unattractive options how do you go about selecting? The ability to make tough decisions is the ability to look at a set of options and choose the option you find to be the least bad. In some situations all options are ugly and the only choice you have is to choose your favorite kind of undesirable. But how do you go about making that decision?

To make tough decisions requires being willing to separate our ego from the decision. What does this mean exactly? It means understanding that circumstances in life are not under our direct control. A tough decision is often a decision a person does not want to make or dreads having to make but which they have been entrusted or in other words given the responsibility of making. Examples of tough decisions can be when a nation decides to go to war, or when life support is terminated after failed attempts to resuscitate. Of course there are less morbid examples such as the decision to get married, or go to college, or whether or not to buy a house.

What makes these decisions tough are the personal consequences and gravity of the decision. A decision which can affect your life permanently is a tough decision but a decision which can affect 100 lives, 1000 lives, 10,000 lives, a million lives, is even bigger in scale. Decisions which affect a lot of people are naturally tougher and an example of these kinds of decisions include the decision to increase the block size in Bitcoin, the decision not to increase it, decisions made by the US Supreme Court, but also less obvious decisions such as decisions made by big companies like Amazon or Facebook, by AI developers, by technologists making design decisions. UI/UX designers also make some of these big decisions because they determine what billions of people see every day and their interfaces affect billions of lives.

In order to be successful it is important to think big, and make tough decisions. Thinking big simply means having enough ambition to want to create the best of something, or be the best at something, or truly change something for the better, or to make slow methodical improvements to something. But the point is to think big is to aim high enough that you'll have to make tough decisions in the first place.

There are various decision making styles and the main four are directive, analytical, conceptual and behavioral
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**Conceptual** 

The conceptual decision maker likes to visualize a problem and apply mechanisms to utilize creativity.  We may think of conceptualiists as visionaries in many cases. 

**Behavioral**

The behavioral decision maker is concerned with maintaining harmony. They make decisions in a different and more social way such as through negotiation.

**Directive**

This person is different from the rest in that they may wish to make decisions on their own and take charge. 

**Analytical**

This style is data driven and uses analysis of the data.


The distinction between data driven and gut based decision making
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Data driven decision making tends to be evidence based and in many cases decisions go against the gut. A data driven individual will go where the data takes them just as an engineer or researcher. To highlight the difference, a data driven decision maker in marketing would rely on A/B testing where there is the control and new trial. They would then analyze the difference in the data to determine if the control or the trial is better.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/A-B_testing_example.png

Data driven decision makers require evidence which then can allow them to distinguish or discriminate between an array of choices. A person who is data driven for example might study products in a market not just the front of the package where the marketing is but also the ingredients if it is food, the history of the company, the background of the primary shareholders, and as they update their knowledge their shopping habits should change.

https://pixabay.com/get/e13db00f20f01c22d2524518a33219c8b66ae3d111b710419df0c97c/your-heart-string-881084_1280.jpg

Gut based decision makers do what feels right. A gut based decision maker will follow their heart or gut and will not make a decision which goes against that. Humans are born gut decision makers but learn to be data driven often through training or out of necessity if born into certain environments. So the gut based decision making may be more common than the data driven approach and it has a few advantages in situations where there isn't enough time to properly analyze.

Most people use some hybrid approach due to time constraints. We satisfice and we experience decision fatigue. Yet we all have to make decisions in whatever way works best for us and these different approaches are only based on preferences. If a person who takes the data driven approach had the time to analyze everything then the person would collect more data, analyze more data, and be led to increasingly higher quality decisions. At the same time a person who follows their gut may develop instincts some of which might be heightened awareness of details which help for quick decision making. At the end of the day success is about being right and to be right we must measure success and study failure.

How do we avoid bad decisions?
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It may not be possible to avoid mistakes. Incomplete or missing information can lead to mistakes.  Lack of ability to analyze the held information also leads to mistakes. Decision fatigue can lead to mistakes as people simply get tired.  What people can do is always seek to limit the consequences of their bad decisions but bad decisions are unavoidable. 

Gut driven decisions have their problems in that the emotions or gut can be manipulated psychologically. Does the person following their gut consciously make their decisions or does their subconscious make it for them? A data driven decision maker arrives at the right choices while a gut driven decision maker feels right about a certain choice.


References
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/of-two-minds-when-making/
2. https://blog.udemy.com/decision-making-styles-2/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing