Decision Making Tools And Techniques Paper

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Tools and Techniques Paper and Presentation

What am I going to eat for lunch? What time am I going to leave for work today? What am I going to do tonight for fun? All of these questions are examples of decisions that I need to make. Decision-making is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice; therefore, it can be an opinion or an action. It all begins when we need to do something, but we do not know what. Decision making is therefore a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational. (Wikipedia, 2007)

When we make the choice that we need to make a decision, we should choose a tool or technique that can help us make the correct possible selection. The technique that I have chosen is called "Six Thinking Hats." This technique will help you to look at the decisions that you need to make from a number of different perspectives. It will also allow you to move outside your normal way of thinking. With that being said, it will help you to understand the full depth of your decisions. It will also let you spot issues and opportunities that you might not have noticed beforehand. (Mind Tools, 2007)

For many of us when we choose to make decisions, we use the rational side of us and forget about looking at decisions from a creative, emotional, intuitive, or even a negative viewpoint. When decisions are being made this way, we underestimate resistance to plans, fail to make creative leaps and do not make essential contingency plans. However, if we choose to use the Six Thinking Hats technique, we will than be able to mix emotion, our skill in execution, sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning. (Mind Tools, 2007)

The Six Thinking Hats technique is six different hats with six different styles of thinking. The first hat is the white hat or "the facts, just the facts." (The de Bono Group, 2007) This hat is more focused on the data that is available. With this hat, you need to look at all the information that is in front of you and see what you can learn from it. With that being said, you also need to be able to see if there are any gaps that exist and if there are you need to be able to fill or account for them.

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