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Sunday, February 9, 2014

The decision arbitrator

A recent study from Caltech provides tantalizing clues into decision processes employed by humans. Using experimental results, the study hypothesizes that distinct parts of the brain control habits and goal oriented behaviors and that there is an arbitrator region that makes an eventual decision after comparing these potentially conflicting signals. After the arbitrator receives the two signals (decisions), it selects the one that has the highest probability of success given the problem at hand. The authors propose selective activation or inhibition of these regions as well as the manipulation of the optimization logic used by the arbitrator, could result in more effective medicines for brain diseases.

Better understanding of how the brain circuitry works in making decisions is also useful in the design of business processes and complex organizations. Modern companies and technologies require decision-makers to substantially side-step their evolution driven logic engines. Making decisions under significant uncertainty requires logic that does not fit into habits or goal orientation. With the arbitrator lacking historical parallels to modern problems, it is likely to proxy the current unfamiliar situation with a combination of unrelated past episodes, leading to bad decisions, routinely. Multi-factorial uncertainty is indeed a new experience for modern humans and all indications are that they are perpetuating knowledge from an irrelevant past.

Leaders of organizations need to understand the physiology of their own brains and the physiology of the groups of complex humans they are leading, to be effective.

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