MSLD 511 Personal Blog

Emotions assist us in thriving, avoiding, how we think, behave, react…really how we live each and every day. Emotions coerce us to take action and alter the decisions we make. They also assist in how we view ourselves and the daily decisions we make. According to Shiv, “emotions play a crucial role in the decision-making by allowing us to resolve decision conflict” (2011). Daily decisions, personal or professional, can be cryptic or uncertain solely based on our emotional form. We either leave the decision we have made feeling confident or that we have been overly confident and made a poor choice. From personal experience within work or even personal situations, both positive and negative emotions spread like a wildfire. Emotions are so strong that others can quickly pick up on them and can alter how they are feeling as well. From personal experience, if my manager is confident and in a chipper mood, it sets the tone for the day, but when my manager is having a difficult day, you fee...

This week, we studied the Cynefin framework for decision-making. The Cynefin framework claims that there are specific contexts in which an individual should approach decision-making and breaks down the assumption that all decisions are made equally, or essentially the “one size fits all” mentality (Snowden, 2010). The Cynefin framework is a sense-making model and places procedures to follow in relation to the context to assist in making a decision. The five different contexts are as follows: -Simple; “known knowns…sense, categorize, respond” -Complicated; “multiple answers…sense, analyze and respond” -Complex; “right answers can’t be fretted…probe, sense, respond and approach.” -Chaotic; “relationship between cause and effect are impossible…act, sense and respond.” -Disorder; “unclear which of the four contexts is predominant.”   “The Cynefin framework… allows executives to see things from new viewpoints, assimilate complex concepts, and address real-world problem...

It is often easy to create a process to handle conflict. However, one must seek outside perspectives to often see what is going well versus what is occurring poorly. Individuals need to learn how to excel in collaborative decision-making. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to have collaboration without some form of conflict that arises.   I learned numerous beneficial lessons when collaborating with a team throughout my senior year of my undergraduate degree as we made countless decisions in an effort to complete a mock-campaign on our campus. The process our team was seeking was to operate smoothly together throughout our capstone project, to work hard and receive an A in the class in order to learn how to effectively create and run a marketing campaign. We were all extremely excited for this class and tapped into all the resources our school offered to make our campaign the best it could be. We unfortunately had an individual in the team who did not do their share and who ...