Satisficing describes a behavior in which, faced with a decision, the first available option is chosen that will likely fulfill the intended goal.
The goal is formulated as an aspiration. Options are then sought to achieve it. If, over a longer period, no suitable options are found, the aspiration level for the goal is lowered until the first available option appears that meets the reduced standard.
Time Pressure Amplifies the Rush to Decide
The time pressure under which decisions must frequently be made today probably encourages and amplifies satisficing. Often enough, a day is considered successful when managers have been able to make many decisions.
In every meeting, the aim is to agree on action items, set directions, simplify things, provide certainty. The goal is to create clarity. Each of these decisions describes a small measure of desperation and gives us at least the feeling of:
“Things are moving forward, things are progressing, at least something is happening.”
Binary Thinking Reduces Complexity to Right or Wrong
The eagerness to decide leads us into a trap: we reduce complex situations to binary decisions – right or wrong. One of my favorite questions in workshops that deal with decisions and futures is whether any of the participants know someone who knew they would win the lottery and therefore preemptively resigned and ordered a grand farewell party with colleagues, complete with champagne and caviar, for the day after the win.
The future is not arbitrary – but it can always turn out differently than we imagine. That is why it is essential, in decision-making situations, not to regard the first available answer as the only answer and to be satisfied with it too quickly.
Another – unfortunately often overlooked – alternative is inaction. The dilemma with this answer is that we believe we are not paid for it.
The Truly Important Questions Are in Principle Undecidable
Anyone who makes decisions according to the pattern of right/wrong assumes that the future can be derived from the past and is thus predictable. Given the multitude of decisions we make each day – approximately 35,000 – for the majority of these decisions it is neither possible nor sensible to make them any other way than by the right/wrong pattern.
What matters, however, is to filter out the truly important questions – those that, as cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster (1993) put it, are in principle undecidable. But precisely not acting, when it is unclear which possible alternatives exist besides the first available option, is sometimes the better choice than regarding a single answer as the right one.
“For anyone who has only one answer must inevitably go head first through the wall or through the closed barrier, without knowing what consequences to expect.”
How can we learn to use the space between too few and too many options productively?