What if coaches and practitioners had the ‘time lapse’ & ‘slow mo’ function on their decision making?
Tags: Simple Vs Complex; Ecological Rational; Exposure, Experience & Expertise; Heuristics; Black box Expertise; Back to the future; Hot Action and Decision Making; Decision making Factors; Dissonance; Cognitive Load Theory; Retrospective Reflection
Wouldn’t it be cool if practitioner and coaches could apply ‘time lapse’ and the ‘slow motion’ functions to their decision making. Imagine being able to playback in the blink of an eye, the vivid detail of a complex action decision or in the moment, slow down time so that the coach or practitioner can extract all the detail as it unfolds in front of them. If we had this feature enabled, would it help us to make better decisions?
How much time in coach and practitioner education do we spend exploring ‘the decision’ and decision making?
- Why did you do that?
- What led you to that course of action?
- How did you know to do that?
All great questions to be asked or to explore when reflecting however, when we become more experienced, we tend to be less consciously aware of much of internal deliberation and thought, locking it in to our unconscious or storing it in the ‘dark space’ known as the tacit domain. Although knowledge in the dark space isn’t necessarily accessible in the moment, it can be called upon and surface rapidly when triggered – fueling both our ability to act in the moment and, giving us options when presented with complex situations.
John Boyd’s OODA loops strike me as a very useful tool for developing better decision makers. The OODA loop:
Observe – the situation
Orientate – make sense if it
Decide – choose a course of action
Act – do it
If we want to support better decision making in the moment, we need to purposefully and deliberately focus in on that moment and extract as much of the ‘juice’ out of it as possible. The OODA loop provides a structure that coach/practitioner or mentor could utilize to make sense of unfolding events and the decisions that they made. Over time, what is initially slow, deliberative, purposeful conscious decision making becomes rapid, intuitive, non deliberative and unconscious and this is a characteristic of expertise. The greater the detail that we explore our action decisions in, the higher the definition and clarity of our recall as the event as it played out. With practice, we can submit these detailed experiences to the dark space to be called upon when required in the moment.
