The reality of difficult decision making situations

Abstract

Decision making is an inevitable thing for every one of us. Many of us work in offices holding responsible positions. Constantly we are confronted with decision making situations. Should we accept what the sub?ordinate says? Should we accept the customer order on the stipulated terms and conditions? Should we agree with the boss’s viewpoints? These are some examples. Students confront decision making situations. Should I skip the class and go for the cricket match? How much preparation is required for the examination? Should I tell the parents about something that happened in the school? Even a two year old child has to make decisions. Should the child cry to get elder’s attention? Should he/she cooperate with the mother for eating? etc. What is also common is that all of us often complain about the difficulty in making decisions. However, none of us have really paused to make an objective assessment of how difficult is it for us to make decisions. We have no idea of what exactly is called “difficulty” in decision making. We merely use the phrase “difficult to make a decision” to explain many things. One common use is “because it was difficult to make decisions, we ended up with not so good performance”. In this sense, we use this for conveniently blaming things and people around us for a bad outcome based on our decisions. When do we end up with a “real difficulty” in decision making? How will we react under such conditions? Bhagavad Git? has a wonderful introduction to this topic. In fact the genesis of Git? itself could be traced to this very idea. We shall see it in some detail.........................