The art of juggling with time
03/19/2025
3 min
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Tick-tock. The omnipresent pressure of time is already a burden when it comes to picking up the children from school or not missing a train. What about in the professional world, when the clock is ticking and crucial decisions have to be made? Melvyn Hamstra, Professor of Leadership at IÉSEG and Doctor of Behavioural and Social Sciences, explains….
Time is one of the determining factors in decision-making: it’s the main resource for evaluating different options before making a decision”, sums up Melvyn Hamstra. But how do you manage the passage of time when making a decision involves considering a whole series of options? ‘Many experts distinguish between two ways of forming a judgement, one or the other being used depending on the circumstances. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ thinking.
The former allows us to move forward quickly, the latter implies a more in-depth approach’. In an emergency, the natural tendency is to take the fast track. At the risk of forgetting the many biases that affect human judgement to a greater or lesser extent: emotions, context, stereotypes, etc. Does urgency necessarily play a systematic role? Not necessarily. ‘Prolonging deliberation unnecessarily and multiplying research to delay a decision can be costly. In contexts where the costs of indecision are higher than any other option, and where the consequences of the decision are low, it is often preferable to decide quickly’, observes Melvyn Hamstra.
Read the full article in the latest edition of Change Magazine (“Time is indefinable”):
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