It seems like we have been plagued by bad decisions. Our bankers, executives, politicians have surrounded us by bad decisions. My interest peaked about decisions and decision-making when I saw Dan and Chip Heath’s latest article in this month’s FastCompany magazine. In Defense of Feelings

They talk about ethics and our taught response is to use our rational /logical thinking when dealing with ethical issues. (Did you talk about feelings in your ethics class? In mine, we were told on the very first class that we were not to use the “F-word, (FEEL)” during the semester.)

Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments. He created a situation where a person has an anonymous partner and is told to treat the partner fairly or cheat. They would gain at the expense of the partner if they lied. Some of the participants were told to ignore their feelings and make their decisions based on reason, others were told to take only their feelings into consideration.

The results astonished me. The majority of people using logic only (69%) chose to take advantage of their partners, while only 27% of the gut feel group lied. Given a choice of a rational decision making partner or a gut feel partner, 75% chose rational thinking. Zhong concludes that logical processes focusing on monetary outcomes reduce emotional influences.

I did a search on business decision-making and found over 10,000 articles in business literature. Of the three or four pages of results that I looked at, the majority had ethical or ethics in the title. All things considered, maybe not so surprising.

But it really is surprising. Where did we lose the concept that a “Good Decision,” by definition is always ethical?

It turns out that Mom was right. (Don’t you just hate that?) She always said you make decisions with your head and your heart. Makes me glad decisions in our office aren’t complete until… “It feels right.”

Think about the last time you or your team made a decision. When did you know you’d made the right decision?