The biggest mistake in the decision-making process

At SmartPlanet.com, Michael Roberto, a professor of management at Bryant University, reveals the biggest mistake we make in the decision-making process:

We don’t get enough divergent thinking in the decision-making process. There is a natural tendency for us to converge pretty quickly on either one option or a small set of fairly similar options. We don’t often canvas a wide range of alternatives or perspectives. Often it happens because we frame a problem in a certain way and once it’s framed that way we can’t break out of that frame. For example, in a business context if a company was losing market share, we might get hung up on framing it as a problem of price. The discussion narrowly becomes focused on issues of pricing, as opposed to broadening it to think of all the factors that could be affecting market share.