Improve your decision making.
Your future depends on it.
Time to read: 6 minutes.
Our choices, at least the ones we bind to our futures like promises, demand a great deal from us; our lives depend on the decisions we make and the outcomes they influence. And yet, even when our lives hang in the balance, we often pay attention to our decisions only at the scene of the outcome, dubiously taking the credit, or much more likely wondering where it all went wrong.
We’re always in the middle of things, or so it seems. No beginnings or ends, no discrete cause and effect, just constantly thrown into middles that surge with information, deadlines, and commitments, all pushing and pulling like a current, pressing us to prioritise, prefer one thing over another, predict and plan. Being in-between requires us to make decisions.
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
T.S Eliot, Burnt Norton – Four Quartets
From the moment we wake our attention is hostage to a multitude of clamouring demands and distractions, we direct our thoughts where we believe we require them – often with little success, and so we stutter on our way, tacking between the competing influences of our immediate experience, until exhausted we surrender our thinking to further distractions, and finally sleep and repeat.
If this isn’t our “everyday” experience, it happens frequently enough for us to recognise the quiet desperation that haunts our seemingly futile attempts to orient ourselves, find solid ground under our feet, and take a stand in determining how we will make our own way in the world.
So, are we condemned to live each day in a relentless bewildering confusion of distractions? Or can we hope to learn enough from our daily experience to stage an intervention, and attune our cognitive lives towards the care and attention required to make better decisions?
If we are to believe much of what is written in the self-help literature, we can set about conquering our less than optimal selves by applying more direction via self-discipline, will-power, meditation, mindfulness, greater focus or any number of schemes, naturalistic, pharmacological or scientific. But can we really do anything about our cognitive limitations, and just how limited are we?
“Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbert A Simon
Our capacity for information processing, that is, our sensory data of the world that we perceive, already looks to be under significant pressure just trying to make sense of any one thing among many. Our conscious minds have a processing “bandwidth” of around 50 bits per second, our subconscious by comparison weighs in at around 10 million bits per second, that’s about 200,000 times greater than our conscious mind – 50 bits per second is roughly equivalent to the information we process at our normal reading pace1.
It’s looking pretty bleak for our chances as agents of freewill, our sensory and perceptive information is co-opted by a superior sub-conscious “intelligence”, our worldly experience exploited by an engine of discrimination which denies us direct access and understanding of pretty much everything, and the incompleteness of the information we possess means that there are far more opportunities to get things wrong than right; so can we, or ought we, trust ourselves or anything we think we know?
In the meantime, we‘ll start our fightback using the only weapon we have, we will spend our 50 bits per second re-writing our understanding of experience, the economics of paying for attention, and the making of decisions and mistakes.
“See, infidelity is one kind of sin, but my true failure was inattention.”
Detective Martin Hart, HBO Series I – True Detective
Our need to know is a fundamental driving force for the human race, at its most basic a practical understanding of the world, and our place in it, better prepares us for survival. Lived experience is essential in creating the potential for understanding, so clearly just “turning up and clocking on” for another shift at life, can’t possibly generate the insights necessary to move ourselves towards informed choices. To make a claim on the experience of understanding we need to start by directing our attention sufficiently to allow us to reflect on all our experience.
If we choose to take a touristic journey through our life, we look for, and find only what we have come to see as we drift along incurious and blinded by our pre-conceptions. To travel on the other hand makes a call on us that pulls away from the familiar confirmations of what we believe we already know, creating a distance that provokes an openness and better orients us towards the unknown; our attention is compelled, and we see what we see.
“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
G.K Chesterton
In this account we’ve limited our brief enquiry to the transformational gulf between raw data and wisdom; the life altering potential of attending to what we see rather than affirming our pre-conceptions; we’ve hinted at the revelatory power of directing our attention and the art of knowing along with the wealth of potential we have embedded in our lived experience, and there’s much more to come.
Making better decisions is an enlightening and creative practice which places considerable demands and disciplines upon us, however, this effort generates great dividends in a new economy of wisdom that compounds insight, understanding, and action in a virtuous circle.
Perhaps the greatest promise in improving our decision making, is that staking a claim on our future and making a commitment to fully attend to our lived experience is open to us all. There’s no barrier to entry and each of us can gain from insight into the choices in our lives, improving our understanding and judgement, and realising more of our lifelong possibility and potential. Our lives depend on it.
David Noble is the creator of Axios3, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.
If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios3 workshops.
David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next; Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.
1: The Half Second Delay: https://doi.org/10.1080/14681360500487470