Decision-Making  – Evaluating and Adapting to Changing Conditions

Summary

I can’t quite believe that I have written 20+ blogs and the crucial and fundamental topic of decision-making hasn’t featured thus far. Hand on heart, I have no idea why that has turned out to be the case, but the main thing is that it’s here now and we’ll all be better for this experience moving forward.

This blog topic is delivered in two parts:

1. Decision-making as a concept and process
2. How to ensure your decision-making process is robust to flow with the changing conditions of life

First things first, I’d like you to think for a second about the people in your close circle and consider the following questions. Do you have people in your life who seem to make:

• Consistent, solid, appropriate, good decisions in their lives?
• Random, inappropriate, bizarre, nonsense, bad, decisions in their lives?

Have you ever stopped to wonder why some people seem to have the decision-making process dialed in, while others just don’t? I believe that the main reasons for this is that they don’t have a fundamental understanding of the decision-making process, and they have not created a process that fits with their style and needs.

This blog will take you through decision-making as a process, why it is important, the benefits of having an appropriate process, and consequences of not having one at all.

Part 1: Decision Making

Consider the best decision you ever made in your life. Literally, please stop reading for a second and think about what it was, the outcomes, who was involved, and how you approached the decision.

Now do the exact same exercise for what you would consider to be the worst decision in your life. Be completely honest with yourself.

Write down the decisions, your process followed, and the outcomes and read on.

Have you found any similarities or complete opposites in terms of your approach to the decision? Keep these in mind as you read on.

Making decisions plays a pivotal role in both our personal and professional lives. Fundamentally, decision-making is the process of selecting a course of action from available alternatives to achieve a desired outcome. Deciding involves critical thinking and analysis, weighing known pros and cons, and considering potential benefits and consequences of each option. This is the foundation of a decision-making process.

In a business context, decision-making is essential for:

• Setting strategies
• Allocating resources
• Driving growth

Regardless of what the decision is, effective decision-making requires a structured yet flexible approach to navigate known conditions, parameters, uncertainties, and to seize opportunities.

It is important to understand that effective decision-making is not simply about making choices; it is about making informed, deliberate choices that will help move you or your organization closer towards your goals. By understanding its importance and developing a robust decision-making process, you can chart a path to success, which I will discuss below.

Decision-Making Process

To support a structured and consistent approach to making decisions, I would recommend you encapsulate that in a repeatable process. Every time you are required to decide, a structured process to this will:

• Provide a foundation from which to work
• Create a level of understanding in terms of what is in play at that given moment
• Give you an opportunity to clearly communicate your process to key stakeholders
• Allow you to create consistency and predictability
• Establish gaps when certain components of your process are not present
• Move forward with confidence

While the structure of your decision-making process will ultimately be specific to and for you, it will involve a standardized approach to making informed choices that will include the following key components:

• Gathering information
• Evaluating options
• Selecting the best course of action

This is where it gets personal. Your decision-making process may have further steps, and I will include below a common example. The key I want to emphasize here is that it must work for you. I would urge you to create one (if you don’t have one already), try it out and through trial and (sometimes) error, select the process that fits with you and your style, then modify as required as you move forward. This stands for personal and professional processes.

Key Elements

Building from the key components discussed above, it is important to establish more detailed elements that are meaningful for you and will be appropriate for most decisions that you will make. The following is an example of the key elements which incrementally builds on each other as you navigate the process:

1. Identify the problem: As clearly as possible, define and confirm what decision needs to be made. This crucial first step needs to be as accurate as possible so as not to waste valuable resources as you work through the remaining steps of the process.
2. Gather information: Collecting as much relevant data, insights, and opinions from key stakeholders as possible. Remember at this stage you are only collecting and don’t know enough yet to be able to make any predictions as to what the decision will be. This will be an important message to communicate through this stage of the process.
3. Evaluate alternatives: Using the information gathered, compare possible options based on your required criteria, e.g., cost, benefit, feasibility, safety, customer satisfaction, impact, etc. The output of this part of the process will be a recommendation.
4. Decide: This is the part of the process where you will select the best option. Depending on the type and style of construct you are working within, it might require the decision to be aligned with consensus from other stakeholders or is an individual decision. Either way, the decision should be recorded for communication and future reference.
5. Implement: Once the decision is made you will ensure the appropriate steps are taking to put the decision into action.
6. Evaluate: To ensure a robust process that will provide continuous feedback to your ongoing efforts, it is important to include an evaluation of the decision that was made, and how the implementation is progressing. Essentially, you are looking to determine whether outcomes were as expected, if not why, and whether any course-correction is required.

Your process may abbreviate, consolidate, or expand on these six steps. The key is to ensure you include key components and elements that will allow you to make the most informed decision possible in the moment.

Why is it Important?

If you have read to this point, you have more than a passing interest in the process of decision-making. Consider the answers you captured earlier for your best and worst decisions. Are you experiencing further clarity on the elements of a structured approach that were applied or not to get you to where you ended up?

A structured approach to decision-making is important as it helps to:

• Enhance clarity and direction: Providing a clear(er) path of action, minimizing confusion and helping to align team efforts towards a common goal.
• Facilitate resource management: Ensuring that resources are used efficiently and effectively.
• Reduce uncertainty: Creating a visible process will help reduce ambiguity and discrepancies among stakeholders. This will likely come with the added benefit of reduced stress for all involved.
• Make consistent and well-informed decisions: As the decisions are based on data and structured evaluation, better quality results can be expected.
• Create greater traceability: Decisions can be traced back to their origin and followed through the process. Not to be used as weapons sometime down the road, but for more understanding of if/where steps in the process didn’t serve your overall endgame.
• Improve communications: An established process will help ensure more active understanding of the required steps leading to greater visibility and ability to articulate this to key stakeholders.
• Save time: The more mature and practiced the process, the more efficiencies that will be realized.

These important factors create a compelling case for the employment of an appropriate and repeatable decision-making process for you and / or your organization. Consider how this described process compares or differs to what you have used in the past and today.

Consequences of Not Having a Decision-Making Process

Let’s say that you do not have or use anything resembling a decision-making process. You do what you do and decide what you decide based on how you are and how you feel in the moment. As I like to do when I get to this part of a blog, I offer up that you can take the list from the previous section and inverse those, e.g., reduced clarity and direction, increased uncertainty, etc.

In addition to this inverted list, here is what is most likely in your future if no process is your process:

• Miscommunication: This topic is too important not to repeat. Absence of a structured process can lead to different interpretations, misunderstandings, and confusion.
• Increased errors: The strong likelihood of introducing errors into your process.
• Poor outcomes: Decisions made without thorough evaluation can lead to unintended deviations from the intended outcomes. Most likely, these deviations would not be considered good.
• Measurement challenges: If there is limited rigour in your decision-making, you will find it extremely difficult to be able to measure (and act on) the quality and effectiveness of the decision.
• Inability to improving decision quality: From the previous bullet, you can also expect to struggle to identify key improvement areas post-implementation.

Now, using your examples of good and poor decisions from earlier, having worked through the previous two sections, are you contemplating areas of potential improvement in your own process?

Part 2: Building Agility into Your Decision-Making Process

The world changes rapidly and this means that our permanently changing environments demand more than static decision-making processes. This is where your regular review process for all decisions made is so important as you will learn things about the outcomes, the (potential) changing conditions, and the introduction of previously unknown or unconsidered parameters.

The key is to be comfortable with the knowledge that things do change, and with those changes comes new data and information that can be used to enhance the quality of your future decisions.

Important Point: The review process is not an opportunity to be unkind or unfair to your previous self. Please don’t do that. The review process should be looked upon as a positive opportunity to say to yourself, “Ok, I have enough experience and information from the outcomes of that decision to go back and conduct a review that will help furnish me with more information that will allow me to move forward into future decisions with more clarity and purpose.” Or a version of that.

By having an agility built into your decision-making processes, you will be able to:

• Respond promptly to changes and challenges
• Keep pace with evolving conditions
• Foster a culture of flexibility and open-mindedness
• Encourage continuous feedback and learning loops
• Avoid any form of overcommitment to your original decisions
• Embrace the importance of adaptability
• Develop criteria for assessing when change to your process is required

Things change. Get comfortable with that and use it for your own good.

However you choose to adopt and adapt your decision-making process, ensure that it includes regular review checkpoints. It is important that all decisions are in alignment with your overall goals and changing circumstances. Setting this out up-front will serve you in navigating decisions with grace and elegance in the future.

Coach Gaz Challenge: Evaluate your existing decision-making strategies in conjunction with the principles shared in this blog. Is it close or is it quite different? Please do let me know how you manage decisions in your life, including any recommendations you might have that aren’t included here.

I’m always open to a conversation on your thoughts, opinions, and experiences on this or any topic in the library. Get in touch by subscribing below, or by using the form on the Let’s Connect area of the site.