Making Decisions

There are 6 steps to the process of decision making. If you are the business owner or a manager you are a “decision maker”, most people hate making decisions and try to shift the responsibility when they can. There are no guarantees you will make the right decision every time, but failing to make one, could be worse.

Here are 6 easy steps to help make the process in a rational and logical way.

1.       You must define the problem. Write down the problem so you can look at it, now list everything associated with the problem. Let’s say sale are slowing down, you may have on your list “sales people”, “economy”, “marketing”, and so on. List everything you can think of that’s tied to the sales process. There may be things going on in other areas that are causing your problem. Now you can get the big picture, the problem my not live with your sales people at all but could be in another area. Make sure you completely define the problem.

2.       Gather information. Once you have defined what the problem is you need to round up all the information you can. Talk to others in your company, interview customers if you need to.

3.       Analyze the information. Once you have all the facts and data in front of you dig into it and really see what needs to be done. Make sure you look at the information more than once, it is very easy to come to the wrong conclusion based off bad information.  You may even want to get outside help if the decision is out of your comfort zone.

4.       List options. With most decisions, there can be more than one option. Take the slowing sales problem we talked about in the step. If sales are slowing you could cut prices, change the way you pay your sales people, or work on improving quality. All of the options could be right, but what would be good for everyone? You will almost never only have one option, keep an open mind, and review all the possible solutions.

5.       Choose the best option. Go with the option that makes the most sense. Don’t fall in to the “analysis paralysis” by analyzing the problem forever and not taking action.

6.       Monitor the outcome. There is no guarantee you have made the right decision, and you should never just make a decision and move on and forget about it. Revisit this problem as needed to monitor the results you are getting. If the outcome is not what you had in mind then you need to make another decision.