1Introduction

1.1Management skills in educational institutions and decision-making

Management competencies in educational institutions, according to [10], embody pedagogical leadership within a learning community; an important part of the director's leadership is his decision-making within that community [11]; [12]; [13]. It means that the director manifests certain competencies in the decision-making process because his abilities, attitudes and values ​​are placed in the directive decision, thus achieving a managerial decision-making, which will then be put under the evaluation judgment of the members of the learning community of which the educational director is part [14]. The previous reasoning, leads us to consider that the core of the managerial competences is the decision making, which can be successful, good, regular or downright bad, that is to say, a director can have good attitude, initiative, pedagogical knowledge and skills to coordinate teams etc. However, if that director is systematically wrong in deciding and if his average decision-making performance is bad, the director in question will have disastrous leadership competence. The good and bad directors are made with their results that their learning community achieves in their educational institution, educational results that again depend on good or bad management decisions [15]. Fortunately, we have also learned that good or bad managers are not forever, they can learn processes, practices, develop leadership skills, learn about decision making, and develop managerial knowledge on how to make successful decisions, addressing the cognitive implications of this process [16].

1.2. Successful decisions and risk aversion

As [17] and [2] point out, the pioneers in the application of the foundations of cognitive psychology in decision making under uncertain conditions were Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman [1]. Thanks to this contribution in the field of economic decisions, Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in 2002; essentially the core of Kahneman and Tversky's uncertain decision theory, argues that when managers who decide are in uncertain conditions, they have a "cognitive disease" called risk aversion, so they will always make the most conservative decision, even if it implies a zero gain or a foreseeable loss, so that the decision process will be affected by poor results. If we add to this that there are bad, regular and good managerial decisions [3], then frankly, educational institutions will be adrift in terms of decisions in conditions of uncertainty, by the aversion to risk of school managers already described. Due to the above, successful decisions in conditions of uncertainty in the educational environment will be extremely rare or nonexistent; this is the problem: to have greater elements of knowledge about the directive decisions in conditions of uncertainty, to be able to achieve more and more, the type of successful decisions in the educational environment.

1.3. Objectives

The following objectives were established in order to define the results of this inquiry:

-Describe the characteristics of the process of successful decision-making in environments of certainty and uncertainty, in the basic education managers of a school zone in the state of Durango.

- To determine the measure and type of affectation in the successful decision-making in environments of uncertainty of the principals of basic education of a school zone of the state of Durango, by part of those significant indicators of risk aversion.

-Establish significant differences in the different classification groups of primary education directors of a school zone in the state of Durango, according to their perceptions of the process of successful decision-making in uncertain environments.