How to decide when under pressure?
By: Amit Batra
Tags: Leadership, Thinking, Problem Solving, Decision Making, Decisions

How to decide when under pressure?

Critical decision-making seldom happens without any pressure. Handling pressure effectively is imperative for effective decisions. So how can we identify pressure generators and handle them?

Let’s understand the pressure from a dimension of — “How pressure influences our decision-making environment?”.

Pressure influences our decision-making environment and pushes us towards focusing on only a subset of options. It does so by generating three influencing factors that change our decision-making environment, context, and hence decisions:

Acceleration: This is the most common effect of pressure, which forces the decision-maker to accelerate and make the decision faster. This factor reduces the runway available to you to make a decision, which can force your hand into deciding quickly without generating or evaluating options adequately. Filters options: Pressure narrows down your potential prospects. It tends to remove a few possibilities from consideration and thereby reducing your span of possible options. Create Subpar Options: Many times, pressure, can lead to the generation of other options that are subpar and not optimized.

Let’s understand these three factors in action with an example from the medical world. When a person meets with a fatal accident and is brought in a critical condition to the emergency medical room in a hospital, the doctors need to accelerate their decision making and act fast. These options are narrowed down by the patients’ immediate issues for example, blood loss, facilities available, etc. The primary focus, at that stage is to save the person’s life and not necessarily the person’s recovery.

Let’s take another example from the world of financial trading. If a trader has taken some intra-day positions, he will be under pressure to square them off before the trading session. He may or may not get the opportunity to take a favorable decision before the end of the trading session.

In both the above examples, I would like to bring about four key points related to pressure as a factor influencing our decision-making environment:

Pressure may not lead you to bad decisions. Under pressure, you do the best you can. That may not lead you to make the best decision possible, but that does not imply that the decision will be wrong. Most of the time, pressure leads to sub-optimized decisions. Not all elements exerting pressure may be out of your control. Pressure points can be handled once you identify them and assess if they can be moved to an acceptable level, not influencing your decision options choices. A doctor may design the recovery path in multiple weeks or surgeries to mitigate risk and tweak diagnosis paths based on their recovery. Generate interim decision milestones. In a context where pressure is heavy, temporary or immediate decision milestones may need to be assessed or created to ensure the pressure points are addressed at the earliest. Assess what is building pressure. Pressure can build up via changes to external situations and internal variables coming into play. The interplay of internal variable generating pressure can generally be handled and influenced positively.

It is essential to distinguish the difference between pressure and constraints. Pressure influences the environment under which the decision needs to be made. And constraints change the quality and quantity of options available for decision-making.

Picture: Unsplash — Daniel Mingook Kim