Decisions, decisions

I think that the area of career decision making is, in general, much neglected. Interviews, careers ed programmes and professional training programmes tend to focus a lot on identifying strengths and values, working out what you want from a job, and generating options that might fit the bill, but the actual process of making the decision tends to be glossed over. There has been quite a lot written about the sorts of factors that are at play when people make decisions (rational, relational and post-rational), but I'm struggling to find anything that says which kinds of decision making processes lead to the best outcomes. Do please let me know if you know of any research in this arena.

My view is that this is quite a flaw in our collective knowledge. Actually making the decision is one of the hardest and more crucial parts of the process, and one where clients often get stuck, and surely we ought to have a bigger and better body of knowledge to help us help them?

Yesterday though, I stumbled on a really interesting paper (Iyengar, Wells and Schwartz, "Doing Better but Feeling Worse"). This paper looked a two different kinds of decision makers and the correlations between the decision making processes, and how good your decisions turned out to be. The two types of decision makers were the maximisers (who will put a lot of effort into making sure that they've found the best possible option) and the satisficers (who put less effort and thought in to the process, and are more likely to accept a less than perfect job). The measures of how "good" the decision turned out to be were objective success (based on how much they earned - I know, I know, that's a very flawed measure...) and how happy they were both with their decision making process and with their job.

The found that the maximisers i.e. those that we might think went through a "better" decision making process ended up earning more money, BUT found the decision making process less satisfactory and were less happy with their final decision than the satisficers.
The other group, who were less rigorous in their process, ended up on less money, but happier with their choice.

The researchers suggest that one of the problems for the maximisers is that because they considered so many suitable options, they ended up having to reject lots of really quite attractive job ideas, and the effort that they put into making a decision raised their exepctations - they felt that after all that deciding, they ought to have found the perfect job.

I think this is really interesting for us as professionals. The received wisdom is that clients should really think hard about choices, and should put in some effort to generating suitable options and researching ideas. But perhaps this isn't the right way? Perhaps we should be downplaying the significance of the choice, and encouraging them to give things a go? What do you think?