Fundamentals of Level Three Leadership

28. Decision Making

Concept

People make decisions. Often they avoid making decisions; they waffle. Current research suggests that people tend to make quick decisions based on their established VABEs. In micro-seconds, we tend to judge a situation as safe or dangerous. Only when people slow down their thinking, do they—some of them—rethink their snap judgments and perhaps modify them.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for highlighting this phenomenon. (See Thinking Fast and Slow.) Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind described this process as a small rider (our logical thinking process) on top of a large elephant (our quick, values-based snap judgments). Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes went through a painstaking analysis of research confirming this ...