Values as the Driving Force for the Decision Making
Good decisions are essential for success

Overview

• Values as the Driving Force for the Decision Making

Know yourself! Because, when your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.

Karsten Noack

Values as the Driving Force for the Decision Making

Life is filled with choices. Where you go, what you do, and who you become are the result of daily decisions you make.

Values are what we care about.
As such, values should be the driving force for our decision making.
They should be the basis for the time and effort we spend thinking about decisions.
But this is not the way it is.
It is not even close to the way it is.

Instead, decision making usually focuses on the choice among alternatives.
Indeed, it is common to characterize a decision problem by the alternatives available.
It seems as if the alternatives present themselves and the decision problem begins when at least two alternatives have appeared.

I think this represents almost all decision situations and it should be possible to do much better.
Values are more fundamental to a decision problem than are alternatives.

Ask yourself why you should ever make the effort to choose an alternative rather than simply let whatever happens happen.
The consequences of the alternatives may be different enough in terms of your values to warrant attention.
Your reason for interest in any decision problem is the desire to avoid undesirable consequences and to achieve desirable ones.
The relative desirability of consequences is a concept based on values. Hence, the fundamental notion in decision making should be at first values, not alternatives.
In such a decision process alternatives are the means to achieve the more fundamental values.

In my work I consider the role of values in decision making.
The approach is prescriptive: it concerns how values should be used to improve decision making.
The premise is that focusing early and deeply on values will lead to more desirable consequences, and even to more appealing problems than the ones we currently face.
In short, we should spend more of our decision making time concentrating on what is really important: articulating and understanding our values and using these values to select meaningful decisions to ponder, to create better alternatives than those already identified, and to evaluate more carefully the desirability of the alternatives.

Decision-making, values, alternatives, decisions, type, definition, challenges, problem-solving, decision making, experiences, problems, solutions, techniques, choices, work, job, private life, mistakes, emotional, rational, priorities

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© 1998 - 2012 Karsten Noack: Consulting, Coaching & Training Berlin
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Updated 05/10/12