From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

The Neurobiology and Psychology of Making Decisions

Making decisions is one of the most important activities leaders engage in. While good decisions can yield productive outcome, bad decisions can potentially have major negative consequences. Decisions can be made rationally, nonrationally, or irrationally. They can be based on tacit or explicit assumptions that correlate with unconscious or conscious brain processing. And they can be emotional or analytical. On a day-to-day basis, we rarely think about how we make decisions; some happen unconsciously even though they could have a big impact on our lives.⁷ For instance, while conducting his doctoral research, one of us (Prasad) made an unconscious decision one day not to go back to the physics ...