“It’s actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.” – Noreena Hertz (1967) – English Author, Economist and Broadcaster

So I have this theory that great business leaders do not only make great and daring business decisions for business sake only, they have to. They have so much respect for colleague CEO’s that they have to make decisions. The business environment in the history of business has never been this competitive. Evernote CEO Phil Libin says, “Fear is often a main motivator in our decision-making. It’s useful for short-term choices, such as whether to ‘fight or run away’.” The part of the brain (called the lizard brain) that makes facilitates those decisions lean towards negativity and fear.

Researchers have researched and discovered that humans have a negativity bias, meaning we react more strongly to negative or unpleasant stimuli. “We’re optimized to make decisions based on fear,” Libin says, cautioning however that it is a bad way to make long-term decisions,

It certainly has been a pleasure to chat to some top CEO’s and business executives, especially at the World Economic Forum. The one thing I found outstanding, is their ability to articulate what is happening in their industry, country and continent and in the world.

Instant quality and speedy decisions elevate the productivity of an top flight organization. A core responsibility of CEOs is not only to make good judgements, but also grow the overall decision-making abilities of his or her team.

The market is fast-paced – sometimes there is enough information, sometimes not. Most CEOs today, operate with limited data and information and cannot wait to make decisions. A delay in decision making could cost momentum as a competitor.

Khajak Keledjian once took a friendly waiver with a friend for $15,000. His friend insinuated that he would not be able to sit still for 15 minutes in complete silence. “I never expected it to be so hard,” Mr. Keledjian says. He even tried going to a church to sit still. “I found myself reaching for my BlackBerry every minute. I couldn’t shut myself down.”

Then he was introduced to Yoga. The rest is history. But we are not talking about Yoga today – we talking about the ability to get synapse reactions going in the brain.

So have you ever walked into a meeting to negotiate, armed with all the facts you could find? You took time to construct and consult team members on the best possible solution and framework to be presented, thinking that it must be a done deal? All of a sudden, it’s up in flames as your solution is rejected. What, it cannot be you think to yourself, you take evasive action and distance the client from making a positive decision with you, even further.

That is because decision making is not logical, it is definitely emotional. Just think about your last decision. You may find that you collected all the facts that supported your leaning towards your emotional bias, in order to make the decision.

“Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a ground-breaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.”

This proved that decision making is definitely an emotional process and experience. Think of it this way. We have so many start-ups these days. However, if you’re a start-up and you are thinking about your competition, you are definitely making decision using your lizard brain. This will make it difficult for you to make long-term decisions.

Let’s take a look at the need to succeed as a CEO. Are the implications logical or emotional?  The natural inclination to work hard is least based on fact but an emotional attachment to achieve. To get to this point, logic, facts and information are collect, sifted and applied. Automatically we now know that feelings pave the ground for reasoning.

Consider this, when the CEO of a company decides to incentivise, they use selective terms such as ‘rewards’ and ‘values’ – both with exceptionally strong emotional connotation.

In a new book called 30-Second Brain, writer science Christian Jarrett explains how the brain comes to a decision with a quick story: From Plato’s charioteer controlling the horse of passion, to Freud’s instinctual id suppressed by the ego, there’s a long tradition of seeing reason and emotion as being in opposition to one another. Translating this perspective to neuroscience, one might imagine that successful decision making depends on the rational frontal lobes controlling the animalistic instincts arising from emotional brain regions that evolved earlier (including the limbic system, found deeper in the brain). But the truth is quite different—effective decision making is not possible without the motivation and meaning provided by emotional input. Consider Antonio Damasio’s patient, “Elliott.” Previously a successful businessman, Elliott underwent neurosurgery for a tumor and lost a part of his brain—the orbitofrontal cortex—that connects the frontal lobes with the emotions. He became a real life Mr. Spock, devoid of emotion. But rather than this making him perfectly rational, he became paralyzed by every decision in life. Damasio later developed the somatic marker hypothesis to describe how visceral emotion supports our decisions. For instance, he showed in a card game that people’s fingers sweat prior to picking up from a losing pile, even before they recognize at a conscious level that they’ve made a bad choice.

Lastly, let me leave you with a power message. Rebecca Law, abandoned a high-level corporate career to found her marketing business Nourish Co. “I was a senior marketing manager, and had the opportunity to take a significant promotion at a senior leadership level. I realised if I took the promotion, I’d be on that ladder forever. So I decided to jump off,” she says.

She went from earning nothing to a six digit salary! “I developed a set of principles that both define how I live my life and the foundations of our business. One of these principles is courage – too often I have seen decision-makers take a safe position or avoid making tough decisions at the expense of great opportunities. At Nourish Co., we make decisions that might not always seem sensible, but as long as we can say we’ve acted with courage we’re happy to take the chance,” Law says.

“How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.”

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