Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

Buddhism is a four step approach to decision making. It focuses on filtering available information, putting that information into context and then quickly making the most appropriate or skilful decision. Those four steps are, observe, orient, decide,. Act. O o d a so the first one, observe, this is where we simply pay attention. We don't make any conclusions. We try to identify the situation at hand. The emphasis here is that we're not jumping the gun. We're only collecting data. Why? Because acting impulsively or with incomplete data may be very unskilful - it could cause a worse situation.