Learning Outcome Assessment 2
Section 102
Summer 2012
Dr Ali Alghazo
Names:
Jehad AlGhamdi: 200900201
Bader Al-Hamed: 200901007
Chapter 9 Summary
The Art of Making Intelligent Decisions
To live is to act, to act is to decide. Everyday life is an endless sequence of decisions
as stated in the book. No day goes by without making executive decisions whether they
are small decisions like what to have for dinner, or big decisions like what major to
choose in college. Using the critical thinking techniques to help us enhance and
rationalize our decisions. To become an effective decision maker you have to question
every possible consequences of each decision. This chapter will summarize and discuss
about Evaluating Decision Making and the Logic of Decision Making, Recognizing the
need for Important Decisions and the Possible Alternatives, and Putting More Time into
Decision Making and Dealing with One Major Decision at a Time.
By Evaluating our Decision Making we try to understand the decision that we are
going to decide. Similarly, trying to think from different perspective to avoid unethical
decision making that could lead to harming others who can be affected by this decision.
The evaluation of decisions helps avoid unpleasant consequences that could be in the
near or far future.
When we make decisions or choose values that challenge or harm our well being then
we are making irrational decisions. What could be a common irrational or unethical
decision making is like deciding to behave in ways that undermine our welfare, this may
be difficult to understand why someone would do such a thing to harm his or her
wellbeing. This becomes more obvious when we analyze and study it, we find that it
could mean deciding to eat fast food or deciding to smoke or to use drugs.
The Logic of Decision Making can be established by first recognizing that you are
facing an important decision. You start looking for alternatives that could help you in
choosing the right decision. By studying the alternatives and evaluating them, that will
help you in choosing the best alternatives.
Recognize the Need for Important Decisions is essential to help identify what’s
needed to make such a decision. By identifying how important your decision is, you can
break it down or start developing alternatives to help in choosing the best decision. Many
decisions go wrong because of failure to accurately identifying the alternatives. The
failure comes from either thinking that something is an alternative when it’s not or failing
to recognize an alternative by not thinking outside the box.
Putting More Time into your Decision Making is a must to help improve it and to
help finding the best alternatives possible. The key here is that we lose an incredible
amount of time through bad decision making, for example people who often lose lots of
years through a bad career choice, this could have been avoided if they took the time to
consider what they really want. By putting more time into their decision making, it will
definitely save them a tremendous amount of time in identifying their life goals.
Dealing With one Major Decision at a Time will help achieve the best decision for
each situation. We need to take all the time needed or possible to think our decisions
through. Speed thinking frequently doesn’t assist us think well through our decisions. The
more things we do simultaneously the better the chances to mess things up. In some
situations that are not right to do, some individuals have plenty of time to think deeply
about something, but they choose not to think at a considerable amount of time.
In conclusion, we need to recognize how important decisions are so that we can decide
how many alternatives to find and how much time to spend to choose the best decision.
We need to think clearly and to think outside the box and from different perspectives
about the alternatives, particularly when it’s a long term decisions.