What is Decision Making?

Decision making is a cognitive process of reaching a decision with the given information and constraints. Decision Making process is an integral part of modern management. It is required at every level of management to ensure organizational or business goals are achieved. Essentially, rational or sound decision making is taken as primary function of management.

How is it different from Logical reasoning?

Logical reasoning is making a decision on the basis of facts and statistics. Those decision can be deduced when the information is available. There is no emotional content involved while making logical decisions. Whereas, decision making involves human emotions, biases, attitudes, ethics and morals. Decision making is beyond the facts but still is analytical reasoning. The circumstance may require you to practice empathy and take decisions. It may involve decisions like what/ who is being ethical and unethical? or what/who is being moral and immoral. These cannot have facts. Many people say that the best way to deal with these kinds of uncertain decision making situations is by selecting the option which makes best business sense and doesnʼt compromise on ethics. But it is not that simple because there may be no one particular right answer to the whole situation.

What are the skills tested in this sections?

In this section, the aspirants are expected to have analytical reasoning skills as well as ability to make decisions within the given constraints. A good reading skills, although not of primary importance, can also help. One requires the thought process of selecting a logical choice from the available options. When trying to make a good decision, aspirants must weight the positives and negatives of each option, and consider all the alternatives. For effective decision making, the candidates must be able to evaluate the outcome of each option as well, and based on all these items, determine which option is the best for that particular situation. Some of the abilities that the examiner is looking for are;

– Your reaction under unknown situations. The section is full of case studies of different circumstances. It is expected of you to understand the situation and come up with solutions to the problems stated in them.

– Level headedness.

– Do you evaluate all the options before taking a decision?

– How fast or slow you are in making a decision?

– Choosing the paragraph to solve in this section is itself a big decision making process. This indirectly tests whether you know your own weaknesses and strengths.

– How well do you understand ethics and morals of the society?

– Do you have the ability to find balanced solutions to difficult problems?

– Can you think like a manager responsible for companyʼs resources and reputation?

Above is an excerpt from the XAT – Decision Making Demystified online course http://goo.gl/TtvKj (170+ enrollments)