Forming Better Judgement and Decision Making

Mark Fryer

We asked our Commercial Director, Mark Fryer, how our Critical Thinking Programme can help individuals and organisations to form better judgement and improve their decision making:

“For several years now ABSTRACT has been researching and learning how people make decisions. We have looked in depth at the human brain and studied people at various levels of seniority in the Military, Financial Services, BioChem, Pharma, Sport, Media, Clinical Manufacturers, and Politics and more. By thoroughly understanding the factors that influence decision making, we can teach people how to make better decisions to meet their goals.

The Hogan principle states character drives judgement, judgement drives decisions and decisions drive business. We like this! Even not making a decision is a decision.

Nearly every person we spoke with when asked “how do you form judgement and make decisions?” responded with – “gut-feel”, “intuition” and/or “experience”. This trend in our respondent’s answers led us ultimately to the brilliant research by Daniel Kahneman. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes “gut-feel” and “intuition” as fast thinking which is based on recognising the familiar from our life experiences and therefore ‘intuitively’ knowing how to act. All this intuition is stored in the System 1 part of our brain and serves us well, the majority of the time. It is the System 2 part of the brain that we need to activate and mobilise to achieve new thinking and even better decisions.

Consider this amazing fact, the typical person has 80,000 thoughts and experiences a day which, applying Kahneman theory, is all filed away for future reference embedding itself eventually in System 1. Applying this to the average-aged person that we spoke to in our research, means they will have had nearly 1,022,000,000 thoughts and experiences, many of them different to yourself, that will influence their ‘gut reaction’.

No wonder people find it hard to agree!

In our modern era of cooperation, collaboration, and inclusivity it is vital that we develop improved ways of working together as teams to drive business forward. At ABSTRACT we have created interesting and applicable tools and models to improve Judgement & Decision Making whether that be for individuals, teams or whole departments”.

Our Critical Thinking Programme high-level journey in 3 moves:

Aligning Character

Forming Sound Judgement

Making Excellent Decisions

The Key Learnings with application are: