Decision Making: How, Exactly, Do We Decide?
My life's dream has come true: I have just become a neuro-scientist!
Well, not exactly. What is true is that the thinking that I've been using to develop a criteria-based decision making model is currently being tested at Columbia University School of Neuro-Economics. I'll explain the first experiment after I give you the background of how I got where I am now.
With a life-long curiousity about how people made decisions, I began studying the brain's decision making structure decades ago. The more i studied, the less sense it made to me: I instinctively knew that decisions were not emotional, as the research and books announced. I knew that even when I wasn't aware of the exact route a decision took while going through my consideration process, I never did anything truly emotional: even when there was an appearance of emotionality, there resided an underlying set of beliefs, values, fears, hopes and dreams - a set of unique criteria that I held in place that made me uniquely me.
Eventually, as I grew up and began reading books on brains, memory storage, pathways to learning, I developed a model that makes sense of the brain's decision making. I actually coded the major systems that define the way decision making, and therefore change (all decisions create change of course), takes place.
In addition, I developed a new form of question (the Facilitative Question) that teaches the brain to navigate through its (conscious or unconscious) internal criteria and make new decisions that maintain the integrity of the status quo, while opening up the possibility for new options.
I call this entire model Decision Facilitation, and have been applying it in the field of sales for 20 years as Buying Facilitation(R). I believe that the use of the model will have profound implications for Sales, Marketing, Negotiations, Change/Leadership, Coaching. Because once we have access to how people can shift their own internal criteria to creatively navigate congruent choice, they can make better decisions, marketers can help people decide in favor of more choices, negotiators can influence decisions with integrity, decisions get made faster, and everything is win-win - ethical, values-based, and honest.
Because I have had no academic training as a decision scientist (or any other sort of scientist for that matter) I have been deemed a Mutant, and have sought scientists to help me experiment on the Model in order to garner some credibility. For the past 10 years, I've been told that my work was "too far ahead of the field" to do experiments on, but was given pats on the head from Paul Schummacher at Wharton, and David Laibson at Harvard. Finally, I found Vince Ferrera at Columbia who became very excited. Our experiments begin this week.
We are beginning the experiments by first proving that decisions are NOT irrational (see Dan Arielly's new book Preditably Irrational). We will be giving subjects items to choose and follow how our experiment set-up gets them to use their internal decision criteria. (I don't want to be too specific as we're just beginning and I don't want to bias the results if some subjects were to read this note.) When we're done, we should have proven that decision making is effected when different criteria are imposed on the same data.
I'd love to begin a dialogue with folks who want to discuss. And, I'm going to Columbia on Thursday as the experiment actually begins!
Thanks for your care and attention. Let's talk! And, for those wishing to read about the Method, it is thoroughly explained in an ebook I wrote in 2003 called: "Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions". You can purchase the book online: www.buyingfacilitation.com. And although it appears to be about 'sales', the ebook is a breakdown of the systems of decision making and how they can be influenced in any collaborative decision making interaction.
Well, not exactly. What is true is that the thinking that I've been using to develop a criteria-based decision making model is currently being tested at Columbia University School of Neuro-Economics. I'll explain the first experiment after I give you the background of how I got where I am now.
With a life-long curiousity about how people made decisions, I began studying the brain's decision making structure decades ago. The more i studied, the less sense it made to me: I instinctively knew that decisions were not emotional, as the research and books announced. I knew that even when I wasn't aware of the exact route a decision took while going through my consideration process, I never did anything truly emotional: even when there was an appearance of emotionality, there resided an underlying set of beliefs, values, fears, hopes and dreams - a set of unique criteria that I held in place that made me uniquely me.
Eventually, as I grew up and began reading books on brains, memory storage, pathways to learning, I developed a model that makes sense of the brain's decision making. I actually coded the major systems that define the way decision making, and therefore change (all decisions create change of course), takes place.
In addition, I developed a new form of question (the Facilitative Question) that teaches the brain to navigate through its (conscious or unconscious) internal criteria and make new decisions that maintain the integrity of the status quo, while opening up the possibility for new options.
I call this entire model Decision Facilitation, and have been applying it in the field of sales for 20 years as Buying Facilitation(R). I believe that the use of the model will have profound implications for Sales, Marketing, Negotiations, Change/Leadership, Coaching. Because once we have access to how people can shift their own internal criteria to creatively navigate congruent choice, they can make better decisions, marketers can help people decide in favor of more choices, negotiators can influence decisions with integrity, decisions get made faster, and everything is win-win - ethical, values-based, and honest.
Because I have had no academic training as a decision scientist (or any other sort of scientist for that matter) I have been deemed a Mutant, and have sought scientists to help me experiment on the Model in order to garner some credibility. For the past 10 years, I've been told that my work was "too far ahead of the field" to do experiments on, but was given pats on the head from Paul Schummacher at Wharton, and David Laibson at Harvard. Finally, I found Vince Ferrera at Columbia who became very excited. Our experiments begin this week.
We are beginning the experiments by first proving that decisions are NOT irrational (see Dan Arielly's new book Preditably Irrational). We will be giving subjects items to choose and follow how our experiment set-up gets them to use their internal decision criteria. (I don't want to be too specific as we're just beginning and I don't want to bias the results if some subjects were to read this note.) When we're done, we should have proven that decision making is effected when different criteria are imposed on the same data.
I'd love to begin a dialogue with folks who want to discuss. And, I'm going to Columbia on Thursday as the experiment actually begins!
Thanks for your care and attention. Let's talk! And, for those wishing to read about the Method, it is thoroughly explained in an ebook I wrote in 2003 called: "Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions". You can purchase the book online: www.buyingfacilitation.com. And although it appears to be about 'sales', the ebook is a breakdown of the systems of decision making and how they can be influenced in any collaborative decision making interaction.
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