We all know that decision making is arguably the most significant aspect of an organization

to make progress. After all, these decisions affect spending,resources,policies,impact of ideas

and, most importantly, success. But,sometimes these decisions are filled with hidden biases

and distortions on an individual level and also at a group level.

Even the evolution in the organizational structure hasn’t been able to address the flaws in

decision making. Let me narrate the decision-making process in my previous workplace.

Most of the time, my manager was the one who came up with an approach/idea and rests all

team members expressed their opinions keeping the manager’s approach as a reference. There

is not much to criticize regarding this approach, as the first idea we hear, coupled with a rich

corporate experience might be the best. But,at times,employees gave unequal weight to this

initial idea merely because it the first and not because of its merit.Also,being a ground-level

employee in the team,I wasn’t able to express my opinions and had to agree to my manager’s

terms.

Besides, my manager had a vast experience of 21 years in that organization itself. So, she

always resorted to the conventional way of approaching the project before even thinking of

the best possible alternatives. According to her,it was easier and familiar to go with a more

conventional approach rather than brainstorming and wasting time to figure other

alternatives.There was also an incident of sunk cost trap involved in my case.I wrote a code

to facilitate auto-login process at the time of teller login.It wasn’t well appreciated by my

manager and neither put to use anywhere.Thus,my time and efforts involved were wasted.

The framing trap comprises of the way of decision making. The process-what, how,when-is

dependent upon how issues are framed and the language used to describe various ideas.

Besides,it is important to know whether the framing is a threat or an opportunity, favor or an

obligation, incidental or accidental.

The above were some of the traps I addressed, which are related to my personal experience-

Anchoring Trap,status quo trap,sunk-cost trap and framing trap.

The point I wanted to make is the decision-making process is highly dependent on the quality

of information that flows within the group and the perspectives of every member. Besides,

most of the traps are interlinked to one another. Sometimes the fault is also within us.For

example,if we get anchored to a trap strongly towards an initial idea,we will be least likely to

give up on that idea and try to pull others into the trap.This situation starts a downward spiral

of many other traps. Thus,we need to be vigilant enough to avoid falling into these traps.

To conclude,some of the pain points to focus on as the organization evolves are:

 As the organization grows at a fast pace,the entrepreneur finds it difficult to handle an

ever-increasing team of employees which leads to a leadership crisis.

 Because of further growth,the flow of information is lost somewhere in between.

 An increase in divisional managers leads to difficulty for the management to comply

with all the divisions that are capable of operating independently.