Decision-making is more than a routine act — it’s a mirror of thought and a statement of intention. While some of its aspects can be modeled and measured like a science, others remain rooted in emotion, intuition, and experience

Decision-making is a basic act that affects everyone’s life ever since that person is capable of making a choice. This act of decision-making affects everything a person does: from what the person will eat, to where the person will go, to what a person will do.  Decision-making, therefore, is not just a simple act but an indication of a thought process. It involves a selection, a choice for which one can be held responsible.

In the early stages of one’s life, decision-making has the veneer of a preference. Soon it becomes the process of arriving at conclusions — not just preference. It involves an elimination of options and an awareness of the consequences that come out of that act.

Put simply, this shows that the individuals must have responsibility for the fallout of their choices. Beyond this, the responsibility for the choice can have reverberating effects. They can range from trivial matters to the more fundamental issues.

It is important to flag this because decision-making, as an act in the earlier stages of one’s life, happens almost instinctively.  It is only later, when one is an adult (or at least dealing with matters significant enough), that one becomes ‘responsible’ for the consequences. The process becomes increasingly complex as one grows older, and the decision choices touch activities that have large fallouts.

This can be concerning financial decisions or decisions related to profession, personal life, projects and the list can go on.  In the ultimate analysis, decision-making becomes both an art and a science.

It is a science to the extent that actions can be measured and consequences quantified. Yet everything in life does not fall into this category, and many consequences leave reverberations for which there can be no measurement. Perhaps it is this state of affairs that has led to the development of a whole domain of knowledge which is referred to as ‘decision sciences’. 

By practice, however, decision sciences have tended to be quantified with statistical tools. Among these are domains like operations research, statistical techniques, and the like. There is a softer side of decision-making which has to do with not-so-tangible fallouts of an act but are equally severe and far-reaching. This has also to do with relationships and emotions. Very often, some choices cannot be revoked or undone. 

Those who choose to think can probably clarify a hierarchy of intangible decision choices, even though the unquantifiable is far more serious and significant than even the decisions that can be quantified. The attempt to understand decision-making needs to percolate everyone’s life far more closely than has been achieved so far. 

There are thinkers, philosophers, and the like who will argue that decision-making is not only an act affecting Homo-sapiens but living creatures at large.

This could include plants, animals and the like. When the leaves of a plant shrivel up in sunshine and heat, it is a response of the plant to the ill effects of sunshine. The stems and branches also get affected.  It is also a decision-making response when ripe fruit detaches itself from the tree and falls; that itself is the decision-making of nature, as it were.  

Decision-making, as indicated, is fundamental to choices, and choices determine whether something is alive or not. 

From the narrative above, it will be obvious that decision-making is the core of life. It should also be clear from the text above that with the age of the entity, the process of decision-making becomes progressively more sensitive.

Attempts have been made to read patterns and structures which would lead to more predictable conclusions.

However, it is important to realise that there are various levels of decision-making, and the fundamental nature of the decision-making process can structure life itself. This has to do with more philosophical approaches to life. It is in this domain that one has to tread more cautiously.

Reference to a popular quote from Shakespeare may help. The quote is from Hamlet, where the lead character says, ‘To be or not to be that is the question. Is it nobler in the soul…’?

So, the quotation goes on. The reference to this popular quote is essential to underscoring a simple act of decision-making that has to do with life itself. That is a separate matter of discussion, one on which many philosophers from various schools of thought have reflected and will presumably continue to do so.

The process itself requires a higher level of consciousness than one may not even be capable of or may not even appreciate. However, various levels exist. The core proposition is the need to recognise that decision-making ranges from the very abstract to the very concrete.

Unfortunately, only so much can be done to train people for life in decision-making.  Much of this would be instinctive or perhaps be in the realm of philosophy.

The only way of handling it is with practice and reflection. It would help to apply techniques where they work and use instinct where they do not. 

Above all, experience may be the best guide: even for the selection of the tools of decision-making.

(The writer is a well-known management consultant of international repute. The views are personal)