Utkarsh NarangFounder, IgnitedNeurons · Your best doers become your worst managers as you scale. I turn them into leaders so your best people don’t leave.

The 5 Levels of Decision-Making towards Building Better Choices

22 Sept 2025 · 2 min

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1:31

In this segment, Utkarsh Narang outlines a decision‑making framework consisting of five hierarchical levels—individual, team, society, nation/state, and multinational/global—and five foundational building blocks that shape each choice: identity, personality, purpose, motivation, and trade. He illustrates the model with a personal narrative about why he launched his podcast, linking his decision to his self‑identified values, identity as a curious conversationalist, and the purpose of fostering deep listening. The example serves to help listeners map their own life decisions—such as leaving a 9‑to‑5 job or starting a business—onto the framework, encouraging self‑reflection on the underlying identity and motivations driving their choices.

Chapters

So there are 5 levels at which decisions are made: individual, team, society, nation plus state, and then the multinational or multi— there's multidimensional, for example, global. And then the 5 building blocks that you spoke about were: the first one is identity, who am I? The second is personality. The third is purpose, which is the internal drive that we spoke about. The fourth is the motivation, which comes and goes, which is never permanent. And then the fifth is trade. Let me take my example, Prathamesh. Okay. So let's talk about this podcast, right? Why did Utkarsh start this podcast? So that was a decision that was taken by an individual because that individual— and challenge me wherever you feel like. I'm going to use this as an example so that our listeners can put themselves in my shoes and say that they go to a 9-to-5 job. They are thinking of leaving their job and starting a business. They are entrepreneurs, but they feel like they want to get back to a job. their parents and they feel like they want to do something else with their kids, things like that. So all the decisions that they can start to put themselves in these shoes. So Utkarsh started a podcast because his identity that he understood was that he operates by a certain set of values. I should say I— he sounds very weird. I operate with a set of values and then I see my identity as someone who can have good conversations, who can deeply listen, and who has the curiosity to learn more from the guests that come on the podcast. So the podcast became an extension. So