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Unit 3: Planning and Decision-making

memory, especially in a short period of time, some of the information (often that Notes
received early on) will be pushed out.

Example: A manger spent a day at an information-heavy seminar. At the
end of the day, he was not only unable to remember the first half of the seminar but
he had also forgotten where he parked his car that morning.
(c) Selective use of the information will occur. That is, the decision-maker will choose
from among all the information available only those facts which support a
preconceived solution or position.
(d) Mental fatigue occurs, which results in slower work or poor quality work.

(e) Decision fatigue occurs, where the decision-maker tires of making decisions. Often
the result is fast, careless decisions or even decision paralysis–no decisions are
made at all.
The quantity of information that can be processed by the human mind is limited. Unless
information is consciously selected, processing will be biased toward the first part of the
information received. After that, the mind tires and begins to ignore subsequent
information or forget earlier information.

3. Decision Streams: A common misconception about decision-making is that decisions are
made in isolation from each other: you gather information, explore alternatives, and
make a choice, without regard to anything that has gone before. The fact is, decisions are
made in a context of other decisions. The typical metaphor used to explain this is that of a
stream. There is a stream of decisions surrounding a given decision, many decisions made
earlier have led up to this decision and made it both possible and limited. Many other
decisions will follow from it.
Another way to describe this situation is to say that most decisions involve a choice from
a group of preselected alternatives, made available to us from the universe of alternatives
by the previous decisions we have made. Previous decisions have "activated" or "made
operable" certain alternatives and "deactivated" or "made inoperable" others.

Example:
(a) When you decide to go to the park, your decision has been enabled by many previous
decisions. You had to decide to live near the park; you had to decide to buy a car or learn
about bus routes, and so on. And your previous decisions have constrained your subsequent
ones: you can't decide to go to a park this afternoon if it is three states away. By deciding
to live where you do, you have both enabled and disabled a whole series of other decisions.
(b) When you enter a store to buy a VCR or TV, you are faced with the preselected alternatives
stocked by the store. There may be 200 models available in the universe of models, but
you will be choosing from, say, only a dozen. In this case, your decision has been constrained
by the decisions made by others about which models to carry.
We might say, then, that every decision (1) follows from previous decisions, (2) enables many
future decisions, and (3) prevents other future decisions. People who have trouble making
decisions are sometimes trapped by the constraining nature of decision-making. Every decision
you make precludes other decisions, and therefore might be said to cause a loss of freedom.
However, just as making a decision causes a loss of freedom, it also creates new freedom, new
choices and new possibilities. So making a decision is liberating as well as constraining. And a
decision left unmade will often result in a decision by default or a decision being made for you.

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