Mi Querencia

Sometimes the decisions we make, the decisions management makes, or the decisions our family members make just don’t seem to make sense. Steve Clark notes in his blog New School Selling what we have known for many years, “Buying is an emotional decision. People buy emotionally and then justify their decision intellectually.” The same can be said for nearly every other decision.

Decisions are made for emotional reasons, political reasons, motivated by the threat of loss, because of anger and the need to control, or for many other imprecise reasons. Then we (they) need to figure out a logical reason to defend our (their) decision. My ongoing inside joke with my wife is that we got her a new car so she would be “safe.” I actually think we bought it because it was an attractive car and blue, “safe” was an afterthought.

Paul Meehl dedicated a good part of his professional career cautioning practitioners of using intuative powers, only, for making clinical decisions. Our clinical input to others may not result in the outcomes we invision because we may wish to have a different outcome, or the other person has a different agenda, or some combination of the two. Giving objective information independent of comment allows that decision maker to use that information as they wish. Adding analysis with the objective information gives context and direction to the information and makes the data more complete.

How do you deal with arbitary decisions, or decisions that are already made, but input is asked for to justify the decison?