Making Better Decisions versus Better Decision Making

Consider why you are learning more about critical thinking. Are you making regretful choices? Have you made mistakes, but do not understand what happened? Are you looking for better results from your choices, or a better process to determine the choices?

Would you rather make better decisions or be better at decision making? The difference can be looked at the former focusing on the results while the later looks at the process. So if you are a critical or analytical thinker, you are likely trying to improve your decision making skills. The result logically would be better decisions over all, yes? Critical thinking can be a part of a life strategy and better process to make decisions.

Are you comparing the news to the world you can see and find that it doesn’t make sense? We all make mistakes of judgement based on faulty analysis, often by our minds misleading us to falsely understand events and circumstances. How can our thinking be correct when the information coming at us is one-sided or missing context? Not only is critical thinking needed to evaluate the situation, but also the data and information used in framing the situation.

As an Intelligence Analyst, I was trained early on to look for multiple sources of information and to evaluate that evidence for validity. In that field, assessments were often made with very few pieces of information. It was key to have multiple sources to overcome the limitations of just one type.

For example, imagery can only show so much and can be misleading. It is only a single snapshot of time. Intercept of electronic and communications emissions have other limitations as well. Reports from human agents can be subject to bias by multiple people involved. When combining pieces of information from those various sources, their specific limitations can be mitigated and allow for a better result of the assessment. So understanding the data and information used in the decision making can be crucial to the outcome.

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