My wife and I were engaged after 30 days of dating and married four months later.
There we were, a couple of early 20-somethings jumping into a life together after only a month.
We weren’t complete strangers, we had been friends for five years leading up to that. Even still, it was an incredibly fast decision-making process. We both recognized that, from the outside, it seemed a little crazy to jump right into marriage. But for both of us, somehow the biggest decision was an easy one to make. When you know, you know.
Though our engagement decision is an anomaly, the subsequent 22 years of decision-making have seen a lot of over-analyzing. We’ve deliberated longer over buying a car than we did over getting married. We took a year to design our house. It took us 2 years to commit to selling our business.
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Most of my coaching conversations with entrepreneurs center around one thing: decisions they’re struggling to make.
Decision-making is a first-order skill that can improve every area of life. The better we are at making decisions, the more enjoyable life becomes.
In Flourish, Martin Seligman (building on Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice) explores two decision-making styles: maximizing and satisficing. Both researchers focused on how decision-making styles impact well-being.
Maximizing
When maximizing, we don’t commit to a decision until we have found the very best option. We research, deliberate, delay, deliberate some more, get advice from others and then finally make a decision once we’re convinced it’s the best possible option. Even after all of that, we may have a sinking feeling that we made the wrong choice.
Satisficing
Satisficing uses a ‘good enough’ framework for making decisions. We have a list of requirements, and once we find a solution that meets each of those requirements, we commit to the choice.
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The research shows that we rarely choose one over the other, we tend to maximize in some decisions and satisfice in others. In my experience, I tend to use maximizing when I feel like the stakes are higher for my decision.
But the research is clear: satisficing typically increases our sense of well-being. Choosing ‘good enough’ decreases decision time and limits regret, which results in us feeling better for longer.
The critical question isn’t which style is better. It’s whether you’re conscious of which one you’re using.
If we’re maximizing, we should be clear on the timeline we’re allowing ourselves to make the decision. If we’re satisficing, we need to identify and prioritize the requirements we’re looking for in making the ‘good enough’ decision.
Knowing what style we’re going to use is even more important when other people are involved in the decision-making process. If I’m satisficing and my wife is maximizing but neither of us are aware of the style the other one is choosing we could be in for frustration or disappointment.
Because most decisions involve other people, we could do ourselves a favour by making a pre-decision decision: what style are we going to use in making this decision?
But some decisions don’t fit either framework. Which brings me back to that decision 22 years ago. It was something else entirely, which raises a different question: when should we listen to our head, our heart or our gut? More on that in the future.