Knowledge Workers Can be Bad at Making Decisions

With the advent of computers, specialized software and big data, more and more companies need knowledge workers on their teams. These workers are people who deal strictly with developing or using knowledge to leverage a company's goals. Despite all of the information available, making decisions becomes a problem for these people for several reasons.

The number of knowledge workers in the workforce doubled from the mid-1980s until 2016, thanks mostly to technology. Every year, there are nearly 2 million job openings for this type of employee. Think about consultants, strategic planners, coders, developers and data entry personnel, and then there are people who make decisions within a company based solely on the information they have at hand.

With all of the tools and capabilities at the disposal of knowledge workers, why do they have problems fulfilling their one true purpose? Making decisions becomes a problem because there is too much of a good thing.

Cognitive Overload

Knowledge workers need information to perform their jobs correctly. Unfortunately, too much information overloads these people's thought processes. They must figure out which metrics to watch and why. Meanwhile, there are industry trends to keep tabs on and overseas markets to pay attention to, and then there's what happens every day with client-facing employees. Amid all of this information overload, there may be very important and subtle details that information experts and decision-makers miss.

On top of the information important to a company's industry, knowledge workers need internal data to monitor the progress of employees, make the right hiring decisions and allocate resources toward the human element of the employer. There is simply too much information all at once for the human brain to handle.

Distracted Behavior and Mistakes

The internet serves as the perfect example of how information-based employees make bad decisions. It causes the human brain to make snap decisions within a few seconds, such as which links to click on, which banner ads to ignore and which videos to watch. Perusing the internet creates a series of lower-grade decisions in which someone just decides how to navigate a webpage without digging any deeper. In this way, workers who deal with information train their brains to do the same thing in a work environment. Rather than read an entire report before making a decision, a manager might just skim the document and only read the first few pages.

When there's too much information to comprehend on the page, employees become distracted by all of the extraneous data and miss the most important details. The data is right there in the report, but the person doesn't understand what he sees because there is too much of everything else. When someone fails to see the most important data, this leads to bad decisions.

Solution

People who rely on knowledge to make decisions can ask three questions to avoid making huge mistakes. What kind of information do they need? Can they decide something with very little information? Does more information change their mind? Knowing the answers to these questions comes from good judgment and problem-solving skills.

Knowledge workers must determine how to do the right thing with the correct data rather than try to gain as much information as possible. Learning this trick takes patience, time and experience.

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