Right-Right Decisions

I have been thinking a lot about one of my assignments during my MBA program.  How do we make decisions?  How do we decide what is best when both outcomes seem to be right?  How do we define what is right?

There are many every day situations everyday when there is no wrong answer, so what the hell do we do?  A pessimist would see these situations as "Screwed if I do and screwed if I don't" as there is no way to make everyone happy.  I see that that the real opportunity here is to find the solution that has does the most good for the most amount of people affected.  Joseph Badaracco (Harvard Professor) came up with a framework to manage and analyze these situations.  Here are the 4 steps:

1. Which way creates the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people?
2. Which individuals and which groups have rights we cannot violate?
3. Where is the uncrossable line?
4. What will work in the world as we know it?

Tough four questions and the old days of doing a Pro/Con list or Risk v. Rewards list simple doesn't work because they only take into account what is a risk or reward for you.  In today's global world there are just simple too many people that are effected by your decisions.  It is difficult to see some times (even though are people that believe they are the center of attention) but everything we decide to do or not do does affect the world (indirectly of course).  

Badaracco's framework provides us a foundation to look at the serious decisions:  Taking a new job, moving the family across country, getting a dog, having or not having kids, choosing a college, etc.  There are a million of these decisions in a lifetime. It would be too much to expect ourselves to use this framework for all decisions and I think we all sort of go through this process for the big decisions.  

I would argue that most of the time we get stuck on one or two aspects of the framework and tend to focus too much on that one aspect and lost track of the complete picture or assign a greater weight to one net consequence than another based on our preferences and not objective facts.  This is extremely dangerous when serious issues such as health care, economy, religion are added to the situation for analysis because it increases the number of people affected by the decision and each person has strong emotional ties to his or hers "objectivity."  The book "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking"  is  a good place to start for those who want to be objective about issues and decisions.  

Best of luck and as always - just my $0.02 worth!

JS