Holographic Decision Making

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The concept of holographic thinking is not new. I got introduced to it as I was working through my training at iPEC. Holographic thinking is the ability to utilize your whole brain versus just a part of it. This is especially useful when making decisions and I will refer to it in the decision making context in this post. I have made a conscious effort to use holographic decision making and I have found it has been of tremendous value to me and makes me more confident in my decisions. I hope you will also be able to benefit from these concepts.

Before I get into the details of holographic decision making, a word on decision making! Many will agree that there are a few decisions in life that are critical to success and happiness. To name a few – your education, career, choosing a life partner, buying a home, the list goes on. In my opinion, life success depends more wholly on the hundreds of small decisions you make each day. When you polish your decision making ability and practice these skills with the small, so called insignificant decisions you make every day, you are training yourself to make really good important decisions. So watch the small decisions you make each day and you will be rewarded with big successes. Very often, decision making is not binary, there are many, many options in between. Be sure not to dismiss your options.

With that backdrop, lets talk about holographic decision making that will help you make the best decision you can make. Think about it as a triangle – the HEAD, the HEART and the GUT. This analogy is easy to remember and use.

The HEAD is your analytical mind and the seat of logic and reason. The HEART is the emotional mind and is where feelings are processed. Finally the GUT is the intuitive mind. When making a decision, all of us have a natural preference, and we gravitate to one of these.

1. If you are like me, your preference is to use logic and analysis to make your decision. You gather facts, analyze them, weigh pros and cons, and then make a decision. Your preference is to make decisions with your HEAD.

2. Perhaps you are a feeling type of person and may have a preference to make a decision by taking into account your own feelings or the feelings of others. You may ask yourself questions like – is this going to hurt someone’s feeling. Will it make someone happy or will it make me happy? If this is you, then you make decisions with the HEART.

3. Maybe you are intuitive and make decisions using your GUT. We all have a gut sense - sometimes we refer to it as our sixth sense, our intuition or our wisdom. Whatever you call it, it really boils down to you “just knowing”! There is no conscious analysis nor are you taking any feelings into consideration. You just know what the right answer is or the decision you want to make.

Whatever your preference, it has worked for you. If logic is your strength, then you gravitate to that method of decision making. On the other hand if you are a feeling person, you gravitate to that method of decision making. And if you are intuitive, then that’s where you go to when you make a decision. However, making decisions using your preference alone is an incomplete way because you haven’t considered the other two aspects. You can obtain the best possible outcome by leading with your preference and then running your decision past the other two filters.

Let’s take an example. Assume you are a manager, responsible for hiring a very important role on your team. You review at least 50 resumes and pick the top 5. You interview all of them by following all the best interview practices. You have your top 2 and you decide to go with the most promising candidate. Of course, this will be a successful hire because the process you followed was a good one. You analyzed the skills needed to do the job (in fact the recruiting software did a lot of that work for you), you interviewed based on a set of questions that were given to you by your recruiting partner. So what's missing? Well, you clearly made this decision based on the head because that is your preference. Now take it through the other 2 areas. How will this person make others on the team feel? Is she a team player, will she use her superior skills to make everyone else look like they are failures or does she have the ability to grow the skill level of the team? That’s the heart stuff. If your answer is yes, great, if not, you may want to have a short phone call to ask questions to probe that aspect. Now take your decision through the gut. Does this hire feel right to you. If you have a nagging sense that this is not the right hire, despite the candidate passing every possible test with flying colours, don’t ignore that intuition. You probably sensed something during the interview that is making you feel that way. Go back and look through your interview notes. What did you sense? Have a brief phone call to clear that up. At the end of this process, your decision should feel right as you put it through all 3 lenses.

By making decisions holistically, you can feel confident that you will make a better decision. As you practice this approach, you will get better at it and automatically use these 3 filters to make your decisions more sound.

So the next time you make a decision, try this approach and you will start finding things you hadn’t considered before. You will begin to feel more confident in the outcome of your decisions. Give it a try and send me a message to tell me how you did!

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

– Theodore Roosevelt