A Decision Checklist

This page offers a summary of the site in the form of a checklist for anyone approaching a particular decision situation.

Are there budgetary constraints? Does it have to be acceptable to the IT department? Does the decision need to be made by a certain date? Is speed more important than quality? Does it need to be innovative? Or traditional? How important is ease of implementation?

Just considering the various potential constraints can greatly facilitate a good decision. It keeps the decision makers focused on the desired outcome rather than chasing down options that are clearly going to be inappropriate.

If those calling for a decision cannot articulate the relevant criteria, then that is the first debate to enjoin. There is always a danger of letting initial decision preferences surface the criteria, which is a time-consuming and demoralizing process. As one option after another is dismissed for a new reason, the decision-making group slowly starts to understand the criteria, but usually at the cost of any real commitment to a quality outcome.

How should we think about the situation? Is it a simple? Or systemic? Is it a question of personal motivation? Or organizational structure? Are the causes simple and close at hand? Or distant and complex? Are we following customer demand? Or creating it? Is the situation mechanical? Or organic?

Sometimes there are simple exercises for loosening up how we're thinking about a situation. One of the most classic is to randomly select a word from a dictionary (preferably a small one) and then try to argue for how the situation is similar to that word. The strained (and often humorous) links that get generated will often breakloose some new perspectives on old problems.

Another simple approach is to leverage the naive view of the newest member of the team. Oftentimes the least experienced member of a group will bring the freshest approach.

Does the situation involve extreme uncertainty? High risk? Will the decision affect a large number of people? Does the decision require compassion ... and objectivity at the same time? These are other similar questions help to isolate which of the 5 decision challenges is the most significant.

Being clear about the decision making forum will not only suggest the best practices to be applied, it will also cue the participants about the parameters of their situation. A small group, for example, may not truly appreciate the larger collective of which they are merely a part. Recognizing that the collective is the decision making forums will remind the group that they need to attend to all the challenges of that forum, and not fall into the more comfortable assumption that they are just a group of equals, which is a much simpler decision making forum.

Or, as another example, a possible "group of equals" may discover that they are really in a boss-subordinate situation since their manager will make the choice and they are serving only an advisory role.

Most decision making sessions open with a debate of possible choice options. And once the content has been invoked, it is a seductive pull on everyone present. It can take real discipline to rein in the discussion and direct attention to the process instead. And it can spare the group wasted time, effort, and good will. Nonetheless it is critical that the group understand how they will navigate some key distinctions:

• How will we involve the greatest number of participants (to secure ease of implementation) while still proceeding at a reasonable pace?
• How will we blend more analytical tools while still making room for more intuitive, emotional or playful approaches?
• How will we balance the need to be expansive and divergent in our thinking with the equally pressing need to be convergent, coming to a consensus and an eventual choice?

This is a question that addresses one of the most common decision challenges, which is uncertainty. If there is a piece of data that would "make the choice for us", then it may be worth the time and money to secure that one piece of data and reduce the uncertainty in the decision.

This is also a dangerous question to pose. While some decisions are hard because of uncertainty, it can be a mistake to imagine "if we just knew X, we'd know what to do." Decisions often involve issues of value or preference. They often require courageous strategy. Customer preference, for example, can inform strategic choices, but "market research" can never take the place of innovation, of the ability to reframe standard problems in insightful ways, of getting ahead of the market.

This is a puzzling point to many. How could a decision be good if the outcome is bad? And how could a bad decision lead to a good outcome? Aren't they one and the same?

The issue is that you have to decide on the quality of the decision before you know the outcome. At some point you have to decide that we've done all we can to follow a good decision process, and even if the outcome is bad, we went about the decision making as well as possible. In other words, we know we're done. There is nothing more we could have done to secure an even better decision.