Decision-making requires us to understand a situation and accurately weigh the alternatives which present themselves to us. To gain such an understanding, we need to do far more than just collect facts and information. Our understanding is subject to all kinds of flaws and biases in our perceptions of reality. As John Sterman describes it: 

Decision-making processes are also unfortunately prone to political influences and increasing bureaucracy. These factors can combine to delay conclusions and dilute our focus on achieving desirable outcomes. Fred Brooks describes these distractions as follows: 

In How Decision-making can be improved, authors Milkman, Chugh, and Bazerman summarize the primary challenges of decision-makers:

If we all behaved optimally, costs and benefits would always be accurately weighed, impatience would not exist, gains would never be foregone in order to spite others, no relevant information would ever be overlooked, and moral behavior would always be aligned with moral attitudes. Unfortunately, we have little understanding of how to help people overcome their many biases and behave optimally.

Our beliefs and values are  

When people or groups make inappropriate decisions, it is usually because these subsystems rush us so we fail to properly consider the right information, even though that information may be accessible to us if we know where to look. Our usable, short-term memory is limited, and we are usually under time and cost constraints to make a decision. As business pressure increases, we find ourselves having to make multiple decisions about many different situations, and these time constraints drive us to perform frequent context switches as we move from decision to decision. This forces us to rely soley on what we are able to keep in our limited, short term memories.  A frantic pace also causes us to fall back on our intuition, and on the choices we best recognize, and this combination drives us to make costly errors.

In How Should We Make Hard Decisions, Jonah Lehrer describes several key strategies for decision-making in the face of these challenges:

Surface details distract us from seeing important opportunities to learn underlying, generalizable principles. Analogical reasoning appears to offer hope for overcoming this barrier to decision improvement.

We trust our intuition, but research indicates that trust is misplaced. We must learn when to move intuitively compelling thinking to more deliberative thinking by creating situations that enable us to employ

For an example of sub-optimal decision-making, consider the American voter. Biases on both sides of the political system tend to drive the decisions which voters make.

Discuss the use of dialog-based decision-making approaches to work across stakeholders and select the best strategic and tactical choices with reduced frustration and drain on the participants. Reflect on decision theory. Include the importance of decision downloading after the decisions have been reached. As Peter Drucker describes it: