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Improve Decision Making through Situational Simulations

How does Decision Making on the front lines differ from THEORY? The theory is that people consider various options before making a decision. That may be true for "long term analysis"-based decision making. On the other hand, in most front line situations, decision making is intuitive. And this intuition is based on a person's previous experience. The more experience one has, the better "library of situations" one has to base their intuition on.

How to utilize Situational Simulation exercises? With the continued retirement of experienced personnel, organizations need to invest resources in trying to capture or "harvest" their experienced worker's learnings, and share it with those who are less experienced. Situational simulation exercises can be utilized to develop the intuition (experience level) of your less experienced personnel, so that they can make decisions with the same effectiveness as your experienced personnel. This is most useful in roles such as dispatching, traffic control, logistics planning, and scheduling.

Steps to Using Situational Simulations to improve Decision Making:

1. Develop Situational Simulation exercises to reflect commonly encountered daily challenges (for example, when dispatching trains on a Single Mainline territory, you have specific daily Meets that are difficult to manage).
2. Every 2-3 weeks, use 15-30 minutes to go through one of the Situational Simulation exercises, ensuring that the participants reflect various levels of experience (for example, a set of dispatchers can go through a Situational Simulation exercise built around a common scenario based on their specific territory).
3. During the Situational Simulation exercise, first, have all participants develop their own individual solution to the situation. Then, have each of the participants take a turn explaining the thought process behind their solution. Use the opportunity to identify common thought processes that result in an effective solution to the situation.

What is Decision Making Superstition? Superstition can muddle the quality of decisions made by experienced personnel. Decision Making Superstition arises when we make an assumption that a problem we encountered was resolved by an action we took; when it is possible that our action was coincidental to the resolution of the problem.