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<\/A>As 2014 comes to a close, take a moment to reflect on all the decisions you\u2019ve made this year<\/STRONG>. The vast majority of them are small but some are undoubtedly \u201cbigger\u201d and more impactful. For example, maybe you decided to change jobs or buy a new car or perhaps you took on a new assignment at work or decided to invest in a particular stock. Try to isolate one impactful decision in particular. As soon as you have one in mind; ask yourself \u201cwas this a smart (good) decision?\u201d<\/STRONG>If you answered \u201cyes,\u201d my hunch is that it is a decision that resulted in a favorable outcome\u2026 and if you answered \u201cno\u201d it\u2019s because it had a poor outcome. The characterization of a decision as either \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d based on the outcome is human nature.<\/STRONG> However common it is, I contend that it\u2019s not a good measure because it categorizes the decision based on what is possibly a random outcome. In other words, the outcome sometimes has nothing to do with the decision<\/STRONG> due to circumstances that are out of our control.
I propose we think about decisions and outcomes separately<\/STRONG>; that is, we make a distinction between the decision process<\/EM><\/STRONG><\/SPAN> and the decision outcome<\/EM><\/STRONG><\/SPAN>. Why? Because by making this distinction, it makes us aware that good decisions can sometimes have bad outcomes and conversely, bad decisions can have good outcomes on occasion. In other words, a \u201csmart\u201d process can be guaranteed, but a favorable outcome cannot. When we focus on always using a good decision<\/STRONG> process<\/STRONG> (which is something that we can control) we can stack the odds in our favor. The result will be better decision outcomes over time<\/STRONG>, which is, after all, what we want; to make decisions with favorable outcomes.
In my next blog, I\u2019ll outline the characteristics of a good (aka \u201csmart\u201d) decision process<\/STRONG> and how we can use it to always (yes, always!) make smart decisions with high probabilities of favorable outcomes<\/STRONG>.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As 2014 comes to a close, take a moment to reflect on all the decisions you\u2019ve made this year. The vast majority of them are small but some are undoubtedly \u201cbigger\u201d and more impactful. For example, m…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,22,8],"industry":[],"product":[226,319,326,331],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-academic","tag-femap","tag-industry-catalyst","product-nx","product-solid-edge","product-teamcenter","product-tecnomatix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}